Roger Dewey’s office is crowded with the tools of his trade. In one corner there’s a stack of large photos and display boards, ready to be slapped on an easel for an impromptu presentation. On the table by the door are piles of brochures, in his filing cabinet, a never-ending supply of reports.
On his desk sits his most important tool, a phone that never seems to stop ringing. If you chat with Dewey for an hour, the phone will ring no less than 10 times. Each time his eyes will dart down to see if it’s a call he needs to take, and half the time it is.
He answers the phone with the practiced skill of a man who does so a hundred times a day. He’s jovial, greeting the caller with a, “Hi, how are you,” but then quickly moving to a practical, “what do you need?”
As the president of the St. Croix Foundation, Dewey is a heavyweight in the arena of Virgin Islands charity, though you won’t often see him swinging a ladle or picking up trash on the side of the road. Dewey practices the savvier side of philanthropy.
“For a lack of a better term, I guess it’s called ‘doing the deals,’” he says. “Putting the right people together to get things done.”
Building a charitable program is harder than you might think. It takes more than just free time and a willingness to volunteer. There is a lot of planning and infrastructure work involved, and this is what Dewey excels at.
He brings together those in need, those who can help, and those with enough money to bankroll an operation.
Dewey has been the president of the St. Croix Foundation since 1993. In that time, the organization has championed dozens of programs across the Virgin Islands. They’ve scraped and painted buildings in Christiansted and Frederiksted, built literacy programs in the schools, provided extra training for police officers, managed federal AIDS money, and the list goes on.
Most charitable organizations choose one or two main areas to focus on. The St. Croix foundation does a little bit of everything.
“We’re masochists,” Dewey says with a laugh. “I don’t know what to tell you. This is what’s needed. Somebody has to have that flexibility.”
Dewey goes on to explain that a multifaceted approach is part of their fundamental philosophy.
“This is the major belief in here: If you solve some of the root causes, then you will obviate the need for a lot of other social supports. That’s what we decided on day one.”
But what are these root causes? Dewey says it’s hard to put a finger on. He relates a story about one of the territory’s former police chiefs who once said that his department “cleans up education’s mistakes.”
He agrees with this in part, but says it isn’t really fair because the schools deal with society’s mistakes. And where do society’s mistakes come from?
The challenges facing the Virgin Islands are too numerous and too complex to lay the blame on one single thing, so Dewey and the foundation take on challenges wherever they find them. It sounds intimidating, but Dewey seems to enjoy it.
“We get up in the morning and see something wrong or something that we think should be addressed, and we can start to do something about it,” he says. “We are the luckiest people because we get to do worthwhile work everyday.”
This is what attracted Dewey to the job in the first place. As a young man from Portland, Me., Dewey wanted to work in the nonprofit world. After college he joined the Volunteers in Service to America program and worked for several nonprofits after that. He enjoyed serving others, but he never found a career path in it.
Around the age of 30, Dewey joined the private sector and became what he calls a corporate “hired gun.” For over a decade he bounced from one job to another, doing things like management consulting and real estate development. His work took him all over the country and eventually it landed him in the Virgin Islands. He arrived shortly after Hurricane Hugo when the St. Croix Foundation was just taking shape.
When a job opened up there, he jumped at it. The work wouldn’t pay near as much, but he saw it as a window back to a more satisfying life.
“It may be nice to make a lot of money, nice to do this, nice to do that, but if you can’t go to work every day and be excited about what you do…” he shrugs. “I’ve had a lot of jobs that were jobs, so I just feel so lucky to have exciting work to do.”
Dewey is 64 now and has no intention of retiring. He can’t imagine how it would be better than his life now.
While in the corporate world, Dewey undoubtedly picked up a number of skills that help him run the foundation, but perhaps the most useful is his sense of pragmatism.
While counting off his organization’s many successes, he doesn’t shy away from bringing up their failures too. He’s backed a number of initiatives that didn’t pan out. When he speaks of them, he doesn’t seem embarrassed or defensive. To him, these failures are just part of the process of figuring out what works.
“There’s nothing wrong with trying and failing,” he says. “A .300 hitter is lionized but you realize he’s failed seven out of ten times.”
Dewey is level-headed about what it will take to address the Virgin Islands’ problems. He doesn’t believe there is one grand plan or quick fix that will transform the territory overnight. Change is gradual.
“It doesn’t get done instantly,” he says. “It takes time.”
Under Dewey’s leadership, the foundation has taken a slow and steady approach. While some of their successes have been larger than others, Dewey is proud of every one.
He often brings up a very small initiative to clean up the streets in Christiansted and Frederiksted as an example of his work.
The foundation provides free space to Catholic Charities for their Christiansted soup kitchen, and Dewey approached them one day to ask if they could help keep Sunday Market Square clean. The group introduced Dewey to one of their clients, a mentally handicapped man who was already picking up litter around the neighborhood.
“He was so proud of what he was doing,” Dewey recalled. “I thought, ‘this is great, let’s support that.’”
Dewey went to the governor’s office and managed to free up some funds from the Waste Management Authority. The foundation now pays a little money to clients at Catholic Charities in Christiansted and 10,000 Helpers in Frederiksted to pick up trash twice a week. It beautifies the neighborhoods while giving work to people who desperately need it.
“That’s a little victory. It’s not a big deal, but I enjoy talking about that because I think it makes a difference in the lives of those people,” Dewey says.
With the closing of Hovensa and the ongoing government budget crisis facing the islands, these type of small victories might not seem like much, but Dewey stands by them. He knows that in the long run they’ll add up to something big.
“We have little successes every day,” Dewey says. “There’s always something good happening.”
