Every semester, new interns come to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation to learn and to take part in the national movement to defend human dignity.
Internships at NCOSE provide energetic and highly motivated individuals the opportunity to address issues of sexual exploitation while gaining new skills through hands-on opportunities that seek to prevent exploitation before it begins, and which foster a national cultural that stands for freedom from sexual exploitation. Interns also enjoy abundant opportunities to meet nationally recognized leaders in the field of anti-sexual exploitation and attend education briefings.
We’re proud to introduce our Spring intern class. They’ve all made important additions to our work these last few months, and we are sad to see them go.
Sara Thomson
Sara is a senior at Brigham Young University studying public health and Spanish. She enjoys dancing, especially swing, country line, clogging, and “in-the-kitchen” dancing. She also loves surfing (the web), hiking the mountains near her hometown of Lehi, Utah, and reading contemporary fiction.
Sara previously worked with the American Red Cross as a Disaster Preparedness Educator where she presented lectures and led activities at elementary schools, recruited and trained volunteers, and implemented community home fire prevention campaigns. She also worked as a Teaching Assistant in family home and social sciences.
During her eighteen-month voluntary missionary service in San Francisco, Sara learned to speak Spanish and worked closely with undocumented immigrants and felt moved to act upon seeing the conditions and hardships under which they live. This realization sparked Sara’s interest in public health; she aspires to assist refugees and undocumented immigrants in the future. She believes that public health is quintessentially important to improve the quality of life at the greatest scale of impact. By using public health models similar to those which the United States, along with several other countries, have adopted regarding tobacco, Sara believes that organizations may create forward movement in several public health crises affecting society—especially that of pornography.
Recently married, Sara has the issues of public health and its relations to the family at the forefront of her mind. By working at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, she seeks to understand how to better work with government officials to improve both domestic and international public health. She also felt inclined to intern at NCOSE to learn about the ties between pornography and other forms of sexual exploitation, the public health crisis that pornography poses, and the organization’s fight against pornography and sexual exploitation. With these issues brought to light, Sara believes that advocates can make impressive headway in the fight to educate and equip the public to confront the dangers posed by pornography.
Regarding her work at NCOSE, Sara shared: “I love being able to see the work that NCOSE does alongside elected officials to create and promote legislation that will benefit the lives of our citizens when it comes to the public health crisis of pornography.”
Leanne Miller
Leanne Miller is starting her senior year at Brigham Young University pursuing a degree in 
sociology with aspirations of attaining a Masters of Social Work in order to practice professionally on a clinical level.
Leanne exhibits an exuberant luster not only in her life goals but especially in her personal interests. When asked regarding her personal interests, Leanne wittily responded “Volleyball, volleyball, volleyball!” It’s probably safe to venture to guess that she enjoys the sport! She’s a summer girl–she loves anything in the sun and near the water. The gorgeous summers of her hometown of Boise, Idaho, surely instilled that love she feels for the summer months. She also thoroughly enjoys movies, especially romantic comedies and action.
Leanne’s recognition of the influence that sexual exploitation, especially pornography, have on social issues motivated her to accept an internship at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Leanne previously held a long-term volunteer activist position with Girls Empowered. With that organization, she mentored at-risk 13-year-old girls who lived below the poverty line and befriended them. She especially focused on educating the girls about themselves, their bodies, handling stress, and other age-critical issues.
As a highly contributing member of the NCOSE team this semester, Leanne said that it’s been “Really, really cool to see the inner workings of a nonprofit which creates such large-scale impact.” She has enjoyed jumping with both feet into the social issue of sexual exploitation and the immersive learning experience offered at NCOSE in regards to this social issue.
Tyler Johnson
Tyler is a senior at Brigham Young University – Idaho studying business finance and Spanish. Living by a favorite adage of his grandpa, “Life’s uncertain, eat dessert first,” Tyler is an opportunist who loves traveling, hiking, playing sports and embarking on culinary adventures.
Tyler’s career interests changed during a two-year, voluntary service mission in northern Argentina where he realized the necessity for social ventures to utilize available resources to spearhead social change movements. From there, he became involved with student support at his school to help launch a campus-wide mentoring program for students who were statistically at-risk of not graduating.
Seeing the social mutilation that pornography causes in the lives of men, women and children alike, the family and society, and recognizing the prevalence of such destruction, Tyler has taken an active interest in combatting pornography and the other forms of sexual exploitation that spring from it. Previous to working with NCOSE, Tyler interned at Citizens for Decency, a nonprofit, anti-pornography group which focuses on educating and changing state-level public policy in order to protect families from pornography’s harms. He sees a great necessity for men to “step up to the plate” and become involved in the movement, create more dialogue on the issue, and actively work to combat the negative effects that pornography has on the home.
During his internship, Tyler has enjoyed seeing the incredible scale of impact that NCOSE makes with its limited resources. Moreover, with such hands-on involvement in the organization, he feels equipped with the knowledge of the basic operations of nonprofits and better understands the ties between all forms of sexual exploitation and the necessary actions needed to better advocate for sexual justice.
