Interview with Luke Thompson

I had the pleasure of interviewing Luke Thompson earlier this year. Luke, 18, runs his own nonprofit, Running for Rescues (@runningforrescues2020) to raise awareness about sex trafficking (www.runningforrescues2020.org) and has become Tiktok famous with close to 350K followers and 6.5 million likes because of this advocacy. I really loved how he used the platform and reached out to see if he would be open to an interview.

Hi Luke! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I just graduated high school, so I’m 18. I decided to take a semester off since I didn't want to do it online and wanted to focus my energy on volunteering and taking a break from the cycle of school. I have always been into humanitarian work; last summer, I was in Africa and I was supposed to be in Africa again but COVID happened so I turned my efforts to sex trafficking and started researching a ton about that.

You founded your own nonprofit, Running for Rescues - can you tell us a little bit about that and also why you decided to start your own nonprofit?

This group, Operation Underground Railroad — I have known about them for almost five years. The guy who runs it is a member of my church. At my church, we are very well-connected, and while our family supported it, I wasn’t very huge on it until the last couple months because I researched what was going on to those kids and in those videos and I learned a lot about child pornography that made me so disgusted and so horrified. The content is the most disgusting thing I have ever read about. The average trafficked minor is sold 15x a day to be raped. I thought if the average minor that is trafficked has to wake up and be raped 15x a day, I can do something to help. I have a voice, I have all this freedom to do whatever I want to do. That was a huge part of my reason about why I got loud about it. So, my campaign Running for Rescue is run directly through Operation Underground, which has rescued 4000 kids and arrested 2,000 predators and traffickers. I didn't want to just have an organization that raises money but does nothing directly, so I ran through them. They are doing amazing work and they're only growing bigger and bigger every year and even brief the president on human trafficking. They've done so much stuff with our government to try and get the government involved in this. My whole goal with Running for Rescues is a personal challenge for me to be to involve people and to just like to speak up, to bring awareness, and have meaning for my social media instead of obsessing over myself.

Why do you think mainstream media doesn’t talk about this?

The mainstream media, a lot of the time they like to protect people, especially because there are a lot of politicians that are involved with this. I know even I posted a viral video that showed all the politicians that had raped four year olds and done all these sick things, and it got removed from the Internet. I was really mad about that. Now, a lot of media companies, a lot of people that are running it too, have power and these giant media companies are involved in it. And a lot of them, if you look at news networks, you know, ABC is having things going on right now and Fox had a huge scandal going where they have histories of sexual harassment in the workplace. You're not going to have news networks speak up about sexual harassment and sex trafficking if they themselves are sexually harassing their employees and they are involved in it. I think that is a huge reason why. It's really disgusting that they won't speak up because there are an estimated 40 million victims worldwide with 10 million being children. That's why I decided to start posting about it online on Tik Tok because it's such an easy platform to go viral on. If the media is not going to share, then I'm going to share and I've been able to get hundreds of thousands of views and be able to get tons of people's attention, which has been so amazing.

On Tiktok, you now have over 160K followers. How are you using this platform and social media in general to promote your nonprofit and the work you’re doing? I saw the donations to your campaign on Tiktok, congratulations.

Thank you, it's so amazing to see and then people wrote the nicest comments along with their donations as well. I had Tik Tok months ago, but I quit because I hated it. I started my campaign just on my Instagram and it wasn't getting that much attention and I was like, I have all these followers on Tiktok, and I might as well just like see if that will do anything, and it did. It was hundreds of people that gave me their support and I was getting like tens of thousands of shares on every video I made about it and I was just like, wow, it’s amazing that this many people want to help. I've been doing a lot of research, looking at petitions and trying to figure out ways I can like lead people in a good direction to be able to help and volunteer so, yeah, I will definitely continue to make videos on Tik Tok because I'm very, very happy with where it's going and all of the support that I'm getting.

Where do you see yourself in five years? How about in ten?

In five years, I hopefully see myself still volunteering through Operation Underground Railroad, which is that amazing group I was telling you about. So either working for them or I would love to be able to go to college and get my degree in business and be able to go approach humanitarianism in Africa from a business standpoint because I'm very big on the human trafficking issue and also the hunger crisis that we have around the world. Those are my two huge issues that I focus on. In 10 years, I would definitely love to have some organization of my own or to be able to be able to be actively working with our government in ways that we can stop sex trafficking and definitely want to be on a rescue team or be heavily involved with rescue missions to rescue these kids. Of course, I just want to bring continued awareness and hopefully my nonprofit can grow to that point where I can be able to have a big supporter base to back me up.

Do you have any advice for people who have a passion but don’t know where to get started to spread awareness or advocate for that cause?

Social media. There’s a lot of bad on it, but you really can use it for a lot of good. One of the amazing things is that we don't really need to read the mainstream media. We don't need to watch the news because social media has everything. It's a place where everyone is kind of their own news anchor in a way where you can go out and you can have a voice and you can speak on issues. Turn to places you can go viral. Tiktok was a great platform for me because I was able to make videos to put facts on there on issues people did not know were even issues. I would say if you have an issue that you are passionate about, get super educated, spend hours researching and see an accurate and factual view. That’s the number one thing. Don’t just hear something on social media and 100% believe them, always fact check them. I would say then start the conversation on social media and connect with people based off of this. I am very grateful for all the people who have contacted me in various ways and emailed me to learn more about it. It really just makes my day.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?

I got my say it’s to make sure you fact check everything and don't just believe everything you hear on the Internet. There's a lot of misinformation out there, and there was one time where I made a video on Tiktok that was actually incorrect. It wasn't the whole video that was full of misinformation, but I wish I hadn't done that. I should have fact checked that title and I didn't do it and it ended up going viral and I got a ton of hate because it was about sex trafficking and I titled it wrong and I felt so bad. Check what you're posting, especially with the hundreds of thousands of people, because a lot of them knew what was going on, I got attacked and so that was definitely my biggest lesson learned.

What can people do to help / get involved?

I would love for people to join my running challenge where people pledge to donate a dollar for every mile they run. Just go out there, get active and appreciate your freedom to run. I can run anywhere I want and 40 million people can't do that. People can also post and repost the things I'm putting on my campaign's instagram and even volunteer. You can go volunteer through Operation Underground Railroad, which is what I'm working on doing myself right now and I’m excited to see where that takes me.

Luke is doing amazing work and it was a pleasure interviewing him! Please go support his work; I'm so thrilled to follow his journey. :)