Our Recent Past.
Our Present Dilemma.

As a reader of this narrative, you are either familiar with Cameron Parish, Louisiana, and its hurricane adversities…or not. In either case, fresh perspective is necessary for focusing attention and taking action on reclaiming Cameron from the setbacks caused by hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike. We need your help to generate rebuilding in Cameron, to enable Cameron to sustain herself with the basic elements every strong community needs—industry, jobs, shops and restaurants, churches and schools. Of course, in the years since these last storms, Cameron has managed to restore some essentials. We are surviving, but not prospering, because outsiders still see us as an isolated frontier—a place to come to only if you fish or work offshore—a place from which to remove the products of your labor, but not a place to visit or live.

To be a community, towns must also contain a sense of community, those things that make them want to belong there. Cameron needs to rebuild its community, to make it better than it ever was—a place not to merely survive, rather, a place for families and businesses to thrive.

You can help us!

In 2009, a small group of dedicated community leaders and stakeholders conceived and created CameronAnswers, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation whose purpose is to jump-start, supervise and maintain the development projects presented and described here.

This is our Vision…

CameronAnswers will initiate development in Cameron Parish
in order to rebuild, sustain and grow the communities, families,
workers, visitors and commerce this parish must have to thrive.

There is natural and resilient optimism that Cameron Parish will recover eventually, but the destruction of the town of Cameron will have delayed normal recovery by more years. For Cameron to survive as the 140-year old hometown it is, there must be: 1) reliable and basic retail offerings to serve residents, businesses and visitors; 2) quality lodging accommodations to serve business and pleasure travelers, including outdoor sportsmen and birding enthusiasts, and, 3) efforts made to attract and create new reasons to return to live in Cameron, taking advantage of its Gulf access and marshland environment, ever-important energy-sector operations and commercial fishing base, and the ability to create green jobs. For people to return their families to Cameron Parish there must be jobs to first attract, then sustain them, and this is our ultimate goal. Cameron needs to re-establish itself as the place for families to come home to, not be driven from, whether by storms or by insurmountable building costs.

And Cameron can achieve more. With effort and investment, it can steadily become a greater industrial community like Port Fourchon 200 miles to the east, offer more outdoor sports than Grand Isle, Louisiana, welcome more weekend beach-goers (as the state has no other recreational beaches on its coastline), and perhaps become an entertainment and retirement destination, albeit smaller, but otherwise like Kemah, Texas or Gulf Shores, Alabama.