WASHINGTON – The mother of slain teenager Trayvon Martin is running for a local office in Florida and says one of the driving factors behind her decision to enter the race was helping out on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Sybrina Fulton, who became a prominent advocate after the 2012 shooting death of her 17-year-old son by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., announced her candidacy for Miami-Dade County Commission last month. In an interview with The Hill's Hill.TV, Fulton said campaigning for Clinton throughout the 2016 election "pushed me in the right direction."

She said it got her thinking and researching what position and seat she'd be best suited for and where she could make the most difference in her community.

"Campaigning for Secretary Clinton made a big difference," Fulton said. "It kind of planted the seed for me, but I still wasn't ready until I prayed on it, and it took almost a year in order for me to decide to run."

Fulton was one of the members of the "Mothers of the Movement," a group of women who lost their children to gun violence. The group campaigned in 2016 to rally black voters on Clinton's behalf.

Another one of the group's members, Lucy McBath, also looked to elected office after Clinton's campaign. McBath, a Democrat from Georgia, took a seat in Congress after being elected to the House in the 2018 election. Her son, Jordan Davis, was shot to death at a Florida gas station in 2012 after the killer complained about the loud music coming from the teen’s car.

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Fulton told Hill.TV that a large part of her campaign will focus on healthcare and gun violence, a topic she has focused on and took the stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention to discuss.

The death of her son, who was unarmed, sparked the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, helping cast a spotlight on racial discrimination and policing, and led to protests over Florida's "stand your ground" law.

Zimmerman was charged in Martin's death but was later acquitted after a high-profile trial that attracted prominent civil rights activists, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, to visit the small, Central Florida city.

Fulton said at the heart of her campaign is a hope that she can "speak for the concerns of the residents of Miami-Dade County."

She isn't alone in hoping to transform her grief into a campaign for change.

Along with Fulton and McBath, Lori Alhadeff, the mother of a student killed in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, high school shooting, won a seat on the school board in Broward County, Florida, which oversees Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — the school where her daughter, Alyssa, died.

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There's also Chris Hurst, who was dating journalist Alison Parker when she and a cameraman were shot and killed during a live news broadcast in 2015. Hurst, a Democrat, went on to defeat a Republican incumbent in the Virginia state legislature in 2017.

Contributing: Maureen Groppe