She was Mayor Parker’s director of youth engagement. Now, she’s planning to run against her former boss in 2027.

Shania Bennett was the director of youth engagement in Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration until she resigned in May. The mayor, she said, once treated her as a protege.

Now, Bennett, 26, says she plans to run against Parker next year — the first candidate to publicly announce their intention to challenge the mayor’s reelection bid in next May’s Democratic primary.

“Sometimes, you have to be willing to hold people you love accountable,” Bennett said in an interview Tuesday. “To be honest, I’m the change that I want to see. I think a lot of Philadelphians [are] waiting on it.”

She released a video on social media Tuesday announcing her campaign with the slogan, “Leadership you can trust.”

A Parker campaign spokesperson declined to comment.

Bennett, who lives in her native South Philadelphia and graduated from Penn State in 2020, said she resigned from Parker’s cabinet in May after realizing the administration would not give her office the budget or authority it needed to accomplish its mission.

”My hands were tied. I couldn’t do anything on behalf of young people," she said. “It was an opportunity for me to put all of my passion into something I really believed in, just to end up disappointed.”

In July, she posted on social media that working for the administration was “the worst experience of [her] life” and that she had quit after “unprofessional harassment.”

No Philadelphia mayor has lost reelection since the city’s Home Rule Charter was adopted in 1951, and Bennett has her work cut out for her if she wants to break that streak in her first run for office.

Parker, 53, has spent 21 years in elected office, and her campaign had more than $1.4 million in her campaign’s bank as of May 4, according to her most recent campaign finance report.

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Bennett said she has not yet put together a campaign team and is still ironing out her policy platform. She plans to conduct listening sessions so she can craft proposals that address Philadelphians’ needs.

“Let me see the things you want me to talk about as a candidate,” she said. “I haven’t seen a candidate that really reflects the people’s choice in Philadelphia.”

Bennett said she was alarmed by last weekend’s “teen takeovers,” when police officers arrested three people after confrontations erupted between large groups of teenagers who congregated near City Hall on consecutive nights.

“It’s just young people acting out, and we have to get to the root cause,” Bennett said. “Is what we’re funding effective, and is it giving us the outcome that we want?”

Parker, a moderate Democrat with strong support among the local party establishment, is seen by some as potentially vulnerable to a challenge from a progressive politician such as District Attorney Larry Krasner.

Bennett said her platform will reflect the problems facing the city, not ideology.

“Some of it might be progressive, but some of it might be: You have to put your foot down,” said Bennett, who founded the anti-violence nonprofit Reach4Peace as a teenager. “Philly has some unique challenges. It is not one party or one ideology that can fix them.”

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Bennett said she understands that many powerful politicians and deep-pocketed groups like labor unions are unlikely to endorse her challenge to Parker. But she’s holding a launch event on Sept. 26 and hopes to gain momentum from there.

“It’s still extremely early, but I’m hoping to announce early to do the hard work of fundraising and listening sessions,” she said.

Parker took Bennett under her wing during the 2023 mayor’s race.

Bennett had previously worked for State Rep. Jordan Harris and State Sen. Nikil Saval, but had no previous ties to Parker before showing up at a campaign office offering to help, she said.

Bennett stood out as a hard-working volunteer as she knocked on doors and organized neighborhood canvasses, and she caught Parker’s eye.

“Every time I saw her, she was hard at work,” Parker said when she appointed Bennett to lead the Mayor’s Office of Youth Engagement in early 2024.

After leaving the administration, Bennett briefly worked for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party as a regional organizing director before resigning to launch her mayoral bid.

“When you leave somewhere with your integrity intact, it’s like, ‘OK, you can do something about it,’” Bennett said. “I was just like, ‘Know what? I’mma press play.’”