St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is now working with one of the top digital influencers and creators in the world, Sebastian Villalobos, helping ensure that the St. Jude mission – Finding cures. Saving children – reaches new audiences across the digital landscape.
Villalobos recently visited the St. Jude campus, to meet with families and learn more about how St. Jude is leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. He also documented his time at St. Jude in a video on his YouTube channel titled This Video Can Change Someone’s Life. To date, it has nearly 500,000 views, 10,000 comments and almost 80,000 likes.
“Visiting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was one of the most incredible experiences of my life,” said Villalobos, a native of Bucaramanga, Colombia. “I am so proud to partner with this world class organization to help raise awareness for its mission and to play a small role in ensuring that no family ever receives a bill from St. Jude for the cost of treatment, travel, housing or food because all a family should have to worry about is helping their child live.”
Twenty-one-year-old Villalobos is a Hispanic multi-platform celebrity with 27 million followers across a range of social media platforms. He has garnered 5.7 million YouTube subscribers on his main channel and has a second channel, VillalobosSebas, where he posts his vlogs and shares more of his life. His YouTube videos typically garner more than three million views each, earning him a spot in the 2016 YouTube Rewind video which features the top YouTubers in the world. He has also appeared on 2 seasons of Disney’s Latin America show Soy Luna, co-hosted Univision’s kids’ talent show Pequeños Gigantes, and was named Man of the Year by GQ Magazine in Mexico.
“I’m always pleased to see young people like Sebastian become involved with the lifesaving mission here at St. Jude because engagement with millennial and GenZ audiences in creative ways is absolutely critical for the future success of our mission,” said Richard C. Shadyac Jr., the President and Chief Executive Officer of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent when the hospital opened in 1962 to more than 80 percent today and we’re working to drive the overall survival rate for childhood cancer to 90 percent. We won’t stop until no child dies from cancer – and with the generous help and support of people like Sebastian and his fans we’ll get there.”
