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.”
Bakhtiari wants to have a seat at the table, draft legislation, and officially represent Atlanta’s most underrepresented citizens. “To be a candidate that’s running as somebody who’s Middle Eastern and queer and a woman, it’s kind of a crossroads that’s never been represented before,” she says.
Already, she’s received positive responses to her candidacy. One Iranian woman wrote to Bakhtiari about her daughter’s excitement at seeing a public figure who looks like her. “She said that made her feel so incredibly happy, that her daughter had someone [who] is running for office [who] she could actually identify with,” Bakhtiari says. And she’s received similarly encouraging stories from members of the LGBTQ community, of all ages. That’s not to say it’ll be easy to break those barriers, but she’s prepared. “There will always be . . . challenges, but they are ones that I’m willing to take head-on,” she says.
Her objective feels particularly poignant in the age of the current White House administration. “Everything that Trump represents is a direct attack on who I am, and my family,” Bakhtiari says, noting that five members of her family were up for deportation under the president’s first attempted Muslim ban. “Trump is anti-woman, he’s anti-gay, he’s anti-Islam — I mean, everything that I represent, everything that makes me who I am, he goes directly against.”
Bakhtiari personally felt the effects of Trump’s presidency immediately after he was elected, when she started receiving racist messages and memes from “alt-right trolls.” But that’s part of why she feels she needs to run. “Running for office under the Trump administration to me is absolutely necessary,” she says. “This is somebody who goes against everything I believe and honestly everything I believe that this country is supposed to represent.”
Even before the election, Trump’s nomination served to solidify a realization Bakhtiari had already made: that investing in local politics is necessary. “It became even more clear to me that we have to build locally,” she says. “If you actually want to have drinkable water, drivable streets, bikeable roads, housing that you can live in, local jobs — if you want to be able to have local businesses survive and thrive in your city, if you want to be able to have better living conditions for kids — all of this falls under the purview of local government.”
And, she notes, “If you don’t have a strong local government, if you don’t have a strong local community, then you can’t deflect a lot of the damage that’s about to come down nationally.” The bottom line? “Democracy is only effective when you have every branch of government working to the level that they are supposed to perform.”
That said, Bakhtiari doesn’t believe effecting the change she wants for Atlanta is a one-person job. “I honestly do believe it takes a village," she says. But she feels like a part of that village. “Everything I am and everything I’ve done, I’ve been shaped by this city,” she says. “I believe that I am someone who has the ability to reach into the diverse corners of this district and unite people because I’ve lived through most of the challenges this community faces. I’ve dealt with homelessness, lived a paycheck away from the street, been pushed from one home to the next multiple times in a year because of foreclosures, predatory lending, and unaffordable prices. I have a finger on the pulse of this community and I will always work to listen to the voices that are rarely heard.”
Related: 9 Steps To Take When Running For Office As An LGBTQ Candidate
