Doug Clark is the Director of UN Affairs for the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. Since 2001, Doug has been on the forefront of defending the family at the United Nations where he has played a key role as a lobbyist and consultant, helping to formulate strategy and providing legal advice in pivotal negotiations. He has earned the trust of pro-family delegates and ambassadors worldwide in his work at UN conferences and events, including: the UN Special Session on Children in New York; the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and its prepcoms in New York and Bali; the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference in Bangkok; High Level Seminars on the Family in New York; the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in San Juan and Mexico City; the UN General Assembly’s celebration of the 10^th Anniversary of the International Year of the Family; Disability Convention prepcoms in New York; the World Health Organization in Geneva; the Human Rights Council in Geneva; African Union Ministerial Level meetings in Johannesburg; the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa; the Organization of American States general assembly in Medellin; and various other UN commissions and committees including the Commission on the Status of Women, the Commission on Population and Development, the Commission for Social Development, the NGO Accreditation Committee, and the Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Doug was part of a three-person diplomatic delegation led by US Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey to Central America, meeting with leaders of government, civil society, and the religious sector, including Honduran President Ricardo Maduro and Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolaños, on national family policy. Doug has assisted in the planning of three World Congresses of Families (Mexico City, Warsaw, and Amsterdam). He participated in the Doha International Conference on the Family in Qatar, and in the annual forums of the World Family Policy Center at Brigham Young University. At the request of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, he took part in a closed forum strategizing on the structure and constitutionality of pending federal legislation on sex trafficking. By invitation of IslamOnline (a highly trafficked Muslim website), he was the featured guest in an online dialogue responding to live questions from around the world on family policy and the United Nations. Colleagues describe Doug as an “astute strategist” and “capable diplomat” whose “deep understanding of the cultures of the Middle East and Latin America” allows him “to build bridges with the most important pro-family delegations.” He has “consistently made a substantial difference in the outcome of key UN meetings. No wonder his input has been repeatedly sought by the US State Department in preparation for major UN conferences.”

Leveraging efforts to defend the family, Doug has mobilized, trained, and led teams of volunteers who have worked at UN events. He directed the creation of an expanded and electronic edition of Susan Roylance’s original Pro-Family Negotiating Guide, the most widely used resource of its kind in the UN. Doug has authored model family proclamations that have been issued by several states, and has drafted pro-family language widely used in official contexts, including by the Department of Health and Human Services in its Celebration of the Family, in a US draft proposal for the Social Charter of the Americas in the Organization of American States, and in a speech to the UN General Assembly at the celebration of the 10^th Anniversary of the Family. He is also one of a handful of individuals who joined in an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court in the Graham v. Florida case, urging the Court not to follow a UN treaty to which the United States was not a party.  

Educated at Brigham Young University, Doug graduated from the Honors Program with a Bachelor of Arts in languages and history, and as a member of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society and Dobra Slova National Honor Society (for the Russian language). He went on to earn a Master of Business Administration from the Graduate School of Management with distinction in business communication, and a Juris Doctor from the J. Reuben Clark Law School where he was Managing Editor of the Law Review and recipient of the Faculty Scholarly Writing Award. He interrupted his schooling to serve a two-year mission in Chile for his church.

Doug’s legal career has included banking and consumer credit law, corporate transactions, RICO litigation defense, and commercial and civil rights litigation. He authored numerous consumer credit and merchant agreements and commercial loan documents for a regional bank, and was the legal adviser for its large credit card department on federal and state regulatory issues. He also assisted in drafting the Utah Consumer Credit Code and other consumer credit legislation. After fifteen years of traditional law practice, Doug accepted an invitation to join the original Law.com where he worked for three years, first as Vice President and Director of Content, and then as Executive Director of Legal Resources Development and co-director of the Product Development Group. He directed the team that created all content, and he identified and negotiated strategic content alliances that helped launch Law.com and lift it to become one of the most trafficked legal resources on the internet. Early in his career, Doug also taught business law as an instructor in the paralegal program at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, and was a grader for the Utah Bar Exam. He speaks several languages, with fluency in Spanish and Portuguese. An avid student of history, Doug has studied and written about the life of Abraham, having retraced the Patriarch’s route through the Middle East and done extensive research on ancient Abrahamic traditions in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Doug and his wife Mila are the parents of three children.    

KENYA: Up to the People Now - http://www.profam.org/docs/thc.edclark.kenya.1004.htm

THE FAMILY IN CONSTITUTIONS OF THE WORLD - http://www.familypolicycenter.org/id33.html

FAMILY POLICY CENTER – www.familypolicycenter.org