COLUMBUS, Ohio—Youngstown Board of Education member Dario Hunter, the only elected Green Party member in Ohio, is now seeking a much higher office: president.

Hunter, 35, is an early entrant in the race for the Green presidential nomination next year. The nomination appears to be wide open as Jill Stein, the party’s nominee in 2012 and 2016, has indicated she doesn’t plan to run again.

Hunter has an interesting background. The son of an Iranian Muslim father and a black Christian mother, he is considered the first Muslim-born person to be ordained as a rabbi. After graduating from Princeton University, he earned a law degree in Canada, then worked as an environmental lawyer in Israel before settling on the south side of Youngstown.

He currently serves as a rabbi in Boardman and as campus rabbi at the College of Wooster. He won a write-in campaign for Youngstown school board in 2015; he joined the Green Party last year.

In an interview, Hunter said he’s running for president because he wants to ensure that the “voices of the marginalized and disenfranchised” are heard in the presidential race.

“I have that background that speaks to all of the issues of fundamental fairness and justice that the Green Party espouses – an openly gay black Jewish man who’s the son of an immigrant,” Hunter said.

If elected, Hunter said he would seek to create a single-payer “Medicare for all” health-care system, have the government ensure full employment, and ban oil and gas fracking. He also called for shutting down the “vast majority” of overseas military bases and slashing the defense budget by half to provide more money for education and infrastructure projects.

Hunter added that the U.S. should stop providing any aid to Israel, because of that country’s “horribly atrocious” treatment of Palestinians.

“I do not believe the United States should be providing any form of aid to Israel or any human-rights abusers,” he said, adding that U.S. aid to Saudi Arabia should also be cut off.

So far, 12 people have filed to run for president as a Green, including former Maryland Green Party co-chair Ian Schlakman and U.S. Navy veteran Joe Collins III of California.

Hunter said he has a leg up on these candidates, as he’s the only one who has successfully run for elected office. Hunter said he’s talked to national Green Party leaders about his campaign, though he added the main response he’s received so far is that it’s “perhaps too early for people to take sides.”

The next step, Hunter said, is to travel around the country introducing himself to Green Party groups and voters to try to make himself the party’s consensus candidate.

“People have a good read or good sense of who is going to be the nominee before you really get to the primary caucus stage,” he said.