Our Story
For John and Susan Dewan, building something successful has always gone hand in hand with using it to serve others. After graduating from Loyola University Chicago, John spent three months on a mission in Honduras alongside some of the poorest families in the hemisphere. This experience taught him how much he had been given in life and how important it was to help others in return.
After this transformative experience, John became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries before he and Susan, driven by a shared love of baseball and numbers, co-founded STATS, Inc. What began in a bedroom office grew into one of America's fastest-growing private companies and the leading source of real-time sports data in the early internet age.
When STATS was sold in 2000, John and Susan remembered that experience in Honduras and put that success to work for others. The result? The John and Susan Dewan Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at driving initiatives that support education, job creation and economic development around the world. Over the past quarter century, their guiding principle has never changed: the most lasting help is the kind that helps people help themselves.
John and Susan came to see climate change as one of the greatest threats to that mission. The communities they served were often the first to suffer from droughts, floods and failing harvests, and the least able to recover. Inspired by Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si', with its call to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, John and Susan asked how they could help keep people from being forced from their homes by a changing climate. Their answer was renewable energy and the creation of Dewan Solar.
At Dewan Solar, we help nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations make the switch to clean energy. We guide them through available incentives, including Illinois Solar for All, and manage each project from analysis and funding to installation and beyond.
Today we are proud to serve Chicago-area schools including Chicago Jesuit Academy, Christ the King Jesuit College Prep and Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep, as well as other nonprofits like Sarah’s Circle and Family Matters. Lower energy bills for these organizations mean more resources for their missions. For John and Susan, that has always been the point.