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Roger Dewey: A Pillar of Rejuvenation

You might say Roger Dewey is a pillar of the community. After all, he's the guy who has kept flaking pillars and piles of bricks from becoming permanent eyesores. As the head of the Saint Croix Foundation for more than 15 years, Dewey has tackled a long list of projects that make the island a better place to live and visit.

Creating "Scrape, Paint, Rejuvenate" program grants, Dewey helped owners of dozens of deteriorating buildings in Christiansted and Frederiksted spruce up their places. Employing his considerable skills at bringing disparate groups together, Dewey even pulled off the restoration of an entire block. Christiansted's Sunday Market Square, a 19th-century meeting place for freed slaves, had fallen into a sad state. But now the newly cobbled south entrance to town sports offices and a coffee house, not a flop house, and is patronized by both locals and tourists.

"You do it for yourself — and then it becomes a nice place to visit," he says of beautification programs for the island's two historic towns. "They are absolute architectural gems and we need to protect and revive them."

Dewey was born in Portland, Maine and grew up in Boston, the son of a cop. After graduating from Tufts and earning a master's degree in business from Rensselaer, he joined VISTA, President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty national service program. With a special interest in community economic development, Dewey came to St. Croix for a project after 1989's Hurricane Hugo. He was hired as the first full-time executive director in 1993 for the fledging Saint Croix Foundation, an organization founded in 1990. He found donors and figured out ways to make limited funds go far.

"Leveraging is one of the things we're very good at — to get more bang for the buck," he says.

Besides redevelopment, Dewey says the Foundation's priorities today are improving public safety, fostering education and strengthening local nonprofits. He obtained Federal grants to install security cameras for towns throughout the U.S. Virgin Islands, and worked closely with Christiansted hoteliers, shopkeepers and restaurant owners to bring police bike patrols and better lighting to the town.

"These partnerships are what make it work," says Dewey.

Besides handling money as a fiduciary for island nonprofits like Toys for Tots and the Shrine Club, the foundation staff has developed its own literacy and educational programs. They adopted a school and have seen fighting and truancy decrease by two-thirds, while continuing to work with educators to study the best practices employed by model schools.

From an original budget of $50,000 a year, Roger Dewey now sees $5 million in program money going through the foundation into the St. Croix community annually, continually improving the island for everybody. "I can look in the mirror and feel like I've accomplished something with my life," he says.