A passionate advocate, Heather Clark, tragically lost her son Nate in a trucking accident. Inspired by her personal tragedy, she fervently champions an organization's cause, determined to prevent other families from enduring the preventable heartache she experienced.

The Institute for Safer Trucking (IST) is a nonprofit organization focused on understanding trucking industry issues and providing data-driven solutions that can address them. They provide resources for families of trucking crash victims and survivors in need of help after trucking crashes. They also provide resources for truck drivers and motor carriers to learn about safety improvements that can help reduce crashes. 

Some of their priorities include an automatic emergency brake system in trucks. This technology works by applying the brakes if a driver does not respond to alerts of an imminent collision or supplements a driver’s braking if it is deemed insufficient. They also work on speed limiters, which limits the maximum operating speed for larger trucks. IST also wants to increase the minimum insurance requirement that truckers have to carry. They also want to require trucks to carry underride guard protections, these would help prevent when a passenger vehicle slides under the body of a truck. 

Heather Clark is an advocate of IST after her son Nate tragically passed away due to a trucking accident. Nate lived in Wilmington, NC after graduating from Clemson University in 2016 with degrees in Business Administration and Pro Golf Management. He worked with Evolve Golf and helped grow the company significantly throughout his time there. He was an old soul who loved weekends out on the boat in Wrightsville Beach and playing golf. 

Nate was killed after coming to a complete stop on I-95 due to traffic when a tractor trailer failed to realize that traffic was stopped and it slammed into the rear of his car. The trailer killed Nate and the passenger in the car ahead of Nate. After the crash Heather began advocating for IST. 

“I think what I'm trying to do is just have this not happen to another family, in a nutshell, like so, somebody else would not have to go through what our family has gone through, that this was something that was preventable,” said Clark.