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| Affiliation | Republican |
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2018-01-01 |
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| Name | Dimitri Cherny |
| Address | 164 Market St
Charleston, South Carolina , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
00, 1960
(65 years)
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Modifed | BrentinCO
May 14, 2018 09:26pm |
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| Info | Born in 1960, Dimitri was the second child and first son in a family of seven. His parents were Eastern European World War II refugees. Childhood friends recall him as a “little scientist,” always curious about the world. He spent much of his youth in the mountains of New England, hiking, sailing, climbing and canoeing. After earning an electrical engineering degree, he began a successful career in the high-tech industry as a product manager who would think outside the box to create radical solutions that his competitors had never considered. That work first took him all over the country, working for a number of startups, two of his own, and then all over the world.
He traveled to third world countries with desperate poverty, where a few had incredible wealth while most suffered. He also visited nations where even a low wage worker could hope to own a home and not have to worry about illness or old age. Each time he returned to the US, where the country was embroiled in an unnecessary war while the middle class was rapidly disappearing, he questioned how things had become so unbalanced. In 2007, Dimitri became disillusioned selling software to the Fortune 500 while civilization was seemingly heading for collapse. Looking for more meaningful work, his out-of-the-box thinking lead him to invent and receive a patent on an airborne wind energy system and start a company to develop it, which brought him to South Carolina.
When the recession hit, investors for renewable energy dried up. Unable to find another job, penniless and homeless, Dimitri found himself living in his car and off the kindness of friends and family. Desperate and ready to make a sign to beg at a highway off-ramp, he saw an ad for a no-money down truck driving school. He began a new career driving big-rigs, eventually traveling through 47 states. While driving the highways of America, he met people in every state who he didn’t know existed. The majority were fearful and struggling, one small disaster away from ending up on the street. They couldn’t get ahead, couldn’t save even a dime, couldn’t afford healthcare, had no job security, and were increasingly discouraged about the future they were leaving behind for their children. It became clear that our current economy is a zero-sum game, rigged to keep the winners winning, and the losers losing. But what could one person do against such a system?
In 2014, while spending days driving trucks out of the ports of Charleston, and nights sleeping on a tiny houseboat he'd built and anchored in the Ashley river, Dimitri decided to run as an independent write-in candidate for Congress against Mark Sanford. After the votes were tallied that November, he had received more than 8,000 votes, almost six percent overall and ten percent of the vote in Charleston, an unusually high percentage for a write-in candidate.
After the election, Dimitri stepped up his social justice work. He became one of the founding members of Black Lives Matter Charleston. He helped form the Charleston chapter of SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice. After the Emanuel AME murders, he spearheaded an effort to remove the flag from the South Carolina Statehouse and helped to get more than a million signatures, which pressured the governor to take action. Within a couple of months of the murders, Dimitri helped form Gun Sense SC to educate South Carolinians on the efficacy of gun purchase background checks. Dimitri also works to promote equal educational opportunities, encourages art for social justice, assists in the movement to expand the public transit system in Charleston, stands up for the LGBTQ community, participates in the movement to prevent offshore drilling, and is passionate about helping the homeless. He has worked to find resources and land for a tiny house village or micro-apartments and connected the numerous people and organizations working on similar projects helping the homeless. His goal has been to make a lasting positive difference in the lives of as many people as possible and to fight for those without a voice. He's working to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for ALL people, regardless of where they started in life.
After the 2016 election, Dimitri visited his family in Vermont for Thanksgiving and quickly realized his mother was getting old very quickly. He stayed in Vermont for all of 2017 and was fortunate to spend more time with his mother that year than in the previous forty years combined. Family comes first. After working at Lowe's in the tools and hardware department for a few months, he joined a small high-tech company that was in need of an out-of-the-box thinking product manager. He's now left that job to begin campaigning in 2018.
Dimitri’s successful rise and unpredictable fall through the American economy made him realize how easily and unexpectedly any one of us could find ourselves in a similar situation. Roughly 75 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, many earning starvation wages and unable to put anything away in savings. Even those who are making larger salaries are on shaky ground, denied cost of living increases and robbed of job security and pensions. Looking to make an even bigger difference in the quality of life of Lowcountry residents, Dimitri believes that what's really needed is radical out-of-the-box thinking to help We The People make America what we've always known it can be - a more perfect country, with equal Justice for ALL and freedom from the fear that keeps us from moving forward and and taking the actions that must be taken if we intend to have our civilization survive and thrive for our children and grandchildren. Dimitri thinks the only way to do that is via federal legislation. That's why he's running for Congress.
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