Running! is a Teen Vogue series on getting involved in the government.

Liliana Bakhtiari is no stranger to activism. She attended her first protest march when she was 8 years old, with her father, a first-generation Iranian immigrant. “I grew up working and doing community service, social justice work, and community organizing and activism,” she tells Teen Vogue. Now the 29-year-old, who grew up in the Atlanta area, is hoping to effect change in a different way: as an Atlanta City Council member for District 5. And though Bakhtiari is relatively young, her life has been packed with experiences that have helped shape her views and her platform.

Bakhtiari’s mother, a second-generation Iranian immigrant, worked to put Bakhtiari’s father through school at Georgia State University. He eventually opened a pharmacy in Atlanta’s historic Sweet Auburn district, providing affordable medicine to people who previously couldn’t access it, and Bakhtiari was right by his side. “I grew up working at my dad’s pharmacy with him,” she says. “I saw a lot of Atlanta at the time when it was really just rampant poverty.”

But she also saw what it was like just outside the city, going to school in Gwinnett County, where she was one of a few Middle Eastern kids among an overwhelmingly white student population. “I faced a lot of racism in elementary school . . . it only worsened as I got older,” she says. “Kids would ask me how many goats I was going to be traded for on my wedding day. I got made fun of fairly constantly for looking different and for having darker hair, for having darker skin. There were certain traditional practices — I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs or do my eyebrows until I was way older, and I got made fun of a lot for that. [People] asked me . . . if my father was a terrorist.”

Bakhtiari suffered from anxiety and didn’t feel at home until she moved to Atlanta proper to attend Georgia State University. “Atlanta was a place where, at the time, I felt like I wasn’t judged," she says. "I felt like I could just come be a part of the community.” And that she did, becoming more invested in community service work.

When she was 20, Bakhtiari started traveling the world, taking any study-abroad or volunteer opportunity she could get to expand her activist reach. Today, she’s been to 22 different countries, including some in Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Central and South America. “I’ve done work with everyone from genocide victims to torture victims . . . to sex-trafficking victims,” she says. “I worked with children who have been trafficked, as well as young women. And I did a lot of infrastructure work. I did a lot of building houses and composting toilets, and also did work around food accessibility and water scarcity, and a lot of environmental justice work.”

At home, Bakhtiari continued her activism, advocating for underserved communities and serving on the board of Lost-n-Found Youth, a nonprofit that works with homeless LGBTQ youths.

The suggestions that she run for political office started years ago, but she didn’t start seriously considering it until more recently, when her frustration with Atlanta’s increasing wealth gap, lack of affordable housing and quality public transportation, and continued displacement of small businesses, working-class people, and senior citizens reached a fever pitch. “It honestly became a situation where I got tired of . . . getting mad and protesting it, and understanding that if I actually wanted to have a voice, and feel represented, and make my community feel more represented, that I was going to have to make a run and attempt to change things.”