The Truckers Missing Child Project was started on Facebook by truck driver Dugal Trimble in 2012. Today, the page has nearly 6,700 likes and the twitter account (@TruckinActivism) has around 4,200 followers.
When asked why he began The Truckers Missing Child Project in an interview with Truck News, Trimble explained, “I thought there needed to be some kind of trucking group because truckers are the eyes of the road.”
Trimbles not wrong. In fact, professional truck drivers logged 279 billion miles in the United States in 2014. With roughly 800,000 children reported missing each year in the United States, or nearly 2,000 children per day, the odds of a truck driver witnessing something are pretty good.
Trimble could have gone about his activism in a number of ways, but he knew social media would have the greatest impact: “I ran across Truckers Against Trafficking a few years back, and that kind of opened my eyes to everything going on. Then I became a local truck driver and had more time to be on the computer, and I started sharing missing-child fliers online…Now everything goes on social media.”
Trimble uses social media to share alerts from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which has been around since 1984.
To visit The Truckers Missing Child Project Facebook page, click here.
To visit The Truckers Missing Child Project Twitter feed, click here.
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