Dalilah Coleman was five years old when a commercial truck struck her family’s stopped vehicle. She is seven now, relearning how to walk. In the months since her story reached this industry, two things have carried her name. One is legislation. The other is a standard, and it asks the freight industry to hold itself accountable without waiting for a law to force it.
Meiborg is a member of the Dalilah Standard.
The question at the center
The Dalilah Standard is a private, voluntary program built around one question: did the people responsible for a shipment take reasonable steps to verify who they were dealing with?
Not whether the freight moved. Whether anyone checked.
That distinction matters because most of the failures this industry has watched play out over the past two years were not failures of capability. The trucks worked. The loads moved. What broke was verification. Nobody confirmed the carrier was who it said it was, nobody acted on the warning signs, and nobody wrote down what they did about it.
Four principles
The Standard runs on four ideas, and they are refreshingly plain.
Verify before engagement. Check identity, authority, insurance, and qualifications before you rely on them, not after something goes wrong.
A red flag starts the inquiry. A warning sign is not automatically disqualifying, but it does require you to dig into the facts and document what you found.
Compliance before capacity. Tight capacity, price pressure, and a delivery deadline do not excuse knowingly putting unsafe freight on the road.
Recognition is continuous. A one-time check is not enough. Material changes call for monitoring, review, and revalidation.
As the Standard puts it: the score is not the story. The evidence and the documented response are what count.
It covers more than carriers
Carriers are one of nine roles with their own requirements. Brokers, freight forwarders, shippers, commercial vehicle OEMs, third-party vetting platforms, insurance providers, load boards, and TMS providers each have their own criteria.
That breadth is the part worth paying attention to. Every chameleon carrier story has a broker who tendered the load, an insurer who wrote the policy, and a load board where the deal happened. A standard that only grades carriers would miss most of the chain.
Governance built to resist capture
A 14-member Governing Council oversees standards, recognition integrity, and enforcement, operating separately from the council that administers the program. No sponsor, founder, vendor, or administrator can veto a properly constituted Council decision.
Seats span carriers, brokers, forwarders, shippers, drivers, finance, insurance, law, enforcement, fraud, compliance, and public safety. One seat belongs, with a full vote, to a family member of someone killed or seriously injured in a commercial vehicle crash.
That last seat is the whole design in miniature.
Status has to mean something
Participation is not a badge you buy and forget. Recognition can be suspended, revoked, or allowed to expire. There are published statuses for additional screening required, correction required, and unable to validate, with permanent disqualification as the program’s highest sanction. Anyone can search the public registry and verify a claim at its source.
The Standard is also clear about what it is not. It is not government approval, an FMCSA safety rating, operating authority, a license, or a guarantee of future conduct. Independent due diligence still applies.
Why we’re part of it
We have spent this year arguing that accountability cannot begin and end with the driver. We have said it about hours of service, about ELD fraud, and about carriers that collect violations under one DOT number and reopen the following week under another.
The Dalilah Standard is the version of that argument that does not require anyone’s permission. No rulemaking. No floor vote. Companies decide to verify, to document, and to be checked on it.
Doing it the right way has always been the standard here. This is a way to prove it, in public, against criteria someone else wrote.
Read the manual. Search the registry. And if you are in a position to tender a load, write a policy, or sign a carrier packet, ask yourself whether you could show your work.
Learn more: dalilahstandard.com
Support Dalilah and her family: gofundme.com/f/stand-with-dalilah-stand-for-whats-right-ezekiel-2230
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