by Kelly Petryszyn and Alexandra Sobczak, photos by Tylar Sutton
It takes strength to persist against the odds. These locals have thrived in the face of danger, illness and displacement. Read their stories of hope, community and purpose.
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Tim Dimoff
When Tim Dimoff enters a restaurant, his mind is already on exiting.
“I walk immediately to the back of the restaurant, and I find out where the back door is,” says the founder and president of SACS Consulting and Investigative Services. After he walks around to visualize all additional exits, he tells his family where they should go if a shooter enters. “If you have a game plan, your ability to survive skyrockets.”
Safety is always front of mind for the former Akron cop. “I’m very strong about fixing the wrong and making it right,” says Dimoff, who wanted to be a cop since he started watching “The Lone Ranger” as a kid. He became a narcotics detective and trained to be the first SWAT team member to enter barricaded and armed subject confrontations.
“I had several close calls,” he says.
A drug raid gone wrong in 1990 was too close — Dimoff got knocked over under the weight of two fleeing officers and his 150-pound SWAT shield and fell down steps. He had a broken jaw and an injured back, and doctors warned that he might be at risk of permanent disability if he got injured again.
He left law enforcement but set out to pass onto the public what helped him survive — the knowledge of how to protect yourself. So Dimoff started SACS 25 years ago to offer security, human resources, training and investigations surrounding high-risk issues like violence and substance abuse.
“I’ve been around chaos, problems, threats, pressure. It’s a wonderful feeling to really understand all those negative things,” Dimoff says. “But it’s an even better feeling to be able to … say, I’m excited to bring a solution to preventing, responding and diminishing it.”
Having faced over 100 confrontations as a cop and over 50 with SACS, Dimoff is an expert on defusing growing tensions. SACS used to have about five issues a year with terminated employees making threats — yet now it’s six to eight cases a month. Dimoff created a national aggressor violent profile system to determine a person’s threat level. If it’s high enough, his security team of ex-military members and ex-law enforcement officers provide protection and confront the aggressor. And that tactic works — SACS hasn’t had anyone follow through on a threat after they defused them.
With recent mass shootings this spring, he’s been doing a lot of active shooter trainings and physical security analyses. With each training, he talks to workers, and bus drivers at Springfield schools in Akron expressed concern they weren’t involved. “Buses are very vulnerable,” Dimoff says. So he developed active shooter training for bus drivers with his research team by analyzing real-life scenarios where an irate parent or deranged person breached a bus and identified what would have helped.
Bob Doherty Jr., the Akron regional consultant for Wolff Bros. Supply, had Dimoff do active shooter training at a Plumbing, Heating, Cooling Contractors Association meeting, and many members were so appreciative. “Some plumbing guys work in schools, targets for these,” Doherty says. “Now the guys know what their first moves should be.”
Trainings like that help reduce death and injuries, even as violence rises. So, as Dimoff teaches, training might give you the power to save yourself. He points to a mother who took a self-defense seminar in which he advised crashing your car during a carjacking so that the criminal will flee. She called Dimoff and mentioned she shared the tips with her daughter. “She said, Within a month, my daughter got hijacked at a shopping center. She wrecked the car, and the guy did get out and run,” he recalls.
The police later caught the suspect and discovered he had a record of rape, robbery and murder.
“My daughter’s alive because of you,” he recalls her saying. “She’s bawling away, thanking me. I’m crying right back telling her, I’m so happy.”
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Bhakta Rizal
When he was 16 years old, Bhakta Rizal spent his days in a Nepali refugee camp sitting under a tree that he and some friends had turned into a makeshift school for children between first and third grades in 1993. There was no education system in place within the camp, and he saw kids dying each day from malnutrition and other causes, so he stepped up to educate them on language and sanitary practices.
“I was very much happy,” says Rizal, who continued teaching until he was 17, “because I want to be a teacher.”
Now, Rizal stands in the middle of an urban farm in Akron, a group of teens listening to him teach how they’re going to create a brick fire ring that they can sit around this summer. He’s been teaching young new Americans since he co-founded Shanti Community Farms, a training farm for immigrants and refugees, in 2017 after he moved to Akron in 2014 and connected with the local Nepali-Bhutanese community.
He told them that he went away to finish 10th grade in India, and when he returned to Bhutan, his home was destroyed and his parents had become refugees in Nepal. “There wasn’t any home,” Rizal says. “I saw only ashes.” Nepali government officials helped him reunite with his family, who eventually moved to Akron.
When he came here, Rizal encountered other former refugees who struggled with employment due to the language barrier. “I had a meeting with them. What you guys are really interested in doing? We want to do the agriculture,” he recalls.
Rizal began teaching them how to get a permit, test soil, neutralize soil and more. He met former Imagine Leadership Academy teacher Tom Crain, who wanted to help the refugee community. Rizal shared with him that he grew up on a 50-acre farm in Bhutan, where his family tended to buffalo, goats, rice, wheat, barley and more. “Farming and gardening is kind of rooted in our blood,” he says.
Together, Rizal and Crain opened Shanti Farms, which partners with Akron Public Schools and has 35 kids involved in programs like after-school sessions where kids get tutoring and work on the farm, classes where they learn Nepali and African dance and Yard Corps, where they work on local properties, mowing, watering plants and weeding.
The kids help grow produce native to Nepal, Congo and more on the farm, like hot round chiles called Dalle Khursani, African peanuts, African lettuce and snake gourds.
“My father actually grows [Dalle Khursani] in our home,” says eighth grader Ramesh Chherti, who is from Nepal and is in Yard Corps. “It’s really hot.”
The produce is sold at the Exchange House in North Hill during Thursday events starting in June called Golden Time picnics, in which the kids make global snacks and perform, and customers get bags of produce and crafts the kids made.
An appreciation for sharing elements of different cultures is a cornerstone of Shanti Farms. The kids, who sit around a picnic table, masks on and arms around each other, talk in Nepali, Congolese and Burmese.
“Since my dad was a farmer, I wanted to carry on,” Chherti says. “It’s really unique how we get to learn about each other.”
Dancing was incorporated in Shanti Farms’ programs after Crain saw the kids dancing at school.
“They would be dancing and doing flipping. Like backflips,” he says. “I said ... I want to see you after school. Show me what you guys can do.”
The kids have a new YouTube channel, called Symbah Afro Boyz, where they post videos of the dances they’ve choreographed.
“You can learn new dances,” says Yoshua Fazili, one of the dancers who is from Tanzania.
The combination of dance and strong work ethic bring monetary tips at events and repeat invitations to the properties they’re working on with Yard Corps, in which they perform a dance after they finish the job. “All the clients and stuff go, We want these kids back,” Crain says.
Shanti Farms has made the community’s culture richer and has even taught a few lessons to the teacher, Rizal, who says he learns things like new cooking styles from the kids every day.
“We have people from 17 countries. It’s a diverse community,” he says. “Our goal is to mingle them.”
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Kimmy Henderson
Although Kimmy Henderson wasn’t sleeping enough and was experiencing delusions, she had an intense creative drive.
“I never painted a butterfly,” the Stow artist says. Yet in 2014, she dipped her paintbrush in blue paint and created a butterfly with contrasting wings — one clearly intact and the other crumbling away.
Afterward, the then-35-year-old was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder, which is characterized by depressive and manic episodes, and later with generalized anxiety disorder.
Looking back, she realizes that those sorts of creative bursts come on while she’s experiencing energetic, euphoric mania. “I have so many ideas … and I have confidence I don’t normally have,” says Henderson. But after mania, low points often bring anxiety, depression and lack of motivation to create, and she manages that with medication and letting out her emotions to music.
To her, that blue butterfly felt like a perfect representation of the duality of mental illness — the inner struggles and the fight to appear fine on the outside — and it became the symbol of her Bipolar Butterfly Project, a movement she started in 2019 to raise awareness and end the stigma on mental illness through public art featuring butterflies.
“I think the stigma is mostly about judgment and being ashamed,” Henderson says, “and worrying that people might treat you differently.”
She recalls experiencing that fear during an early depressive episode. “I remember we were at a lake once, and I was watching my kids swim. … I didn’t want to be alive,” says Henderson. “I kind of knew not to talk about certain things because I didn’t want to be diagnosed with suicidal ideology.”
But she realized how serious these thoughts were after hearing an NPR story on violence and mental health that stated the second leading cause of death for people 10 to 34 years old is suicide and thought of her kids, ages 10 and 13 at the time, who are genetically predisposed to mental illness because of family history. “That is literally what fueled the entire project — to change the future for them,” she says.
A goal of the project is to spur conversation about mental illness and make it OK to get help. “If it was normalized, and everybody had comfortable dialogue about it,” she says, “a lot more people that need help, would be willing to do it.”
Henderson also hopes the butterfly can metamorphize into an overarching symbol of the mental health awareness movement. “I just want to give people a visual, just like the pink ribbon,” she says.
She says more people have been recognizing the butterfly as the project has grown. The butterfly art has landed in places, such as sculptures at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens and the Akron Zoo, a painting on a planter in downtown Cuyahoga Falls and a large wall mural at Belden Village Mall, with several more on the horizon.
To engage youth, Henderson has worked with students. After hearing Henderson’s story, Sarah Dick, a sophomore at Cuyahoga Falls High School, volunteered to collaborate on a butterfly mural at Up Front Art Space for the All City Art Walk. “Mental health is something that like, especially as high schoolers, we don’t want to talk about,” Dick says, adding that the project prompted her to start discussing it with the other artists. “We’re like, Oh, we go through the same thing. … I think that communicating with other people is something that it’s helped me do.”
Henderson has overcome her fear of voicing her depressive thoughts. “I’ve talked to my doctor since then,” she says. “It’s a lot more normal than I thought it was.”
She wants conversations like those to become more common. She says she is thankful the project moves people, but there is still more work to be done.
“I can’t tell you how many people have said it speaks to them and they’re so happy that I’m open about it,” Henderson says, “and how brave I am. And I’m like, This is exactly what I want to change. Because it should not be brave talking about mental health.”
