What is Fair Start?
The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of
social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life.
Social Justice
Because inequality is inherited and unequal opportunities affect kids for life.
Eco Justice
Because children have a right to nature, and healthy, safe environments.
Reproductive Justice
Because it is the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
Why Fair Start?
Governments are failing children’s right to an eco social fair start in life.
We know that early childhood experience is pivotal to lifetime outcomes. Why are we waiting for adverse childhood experiences to occur before acting?
Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning. A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining.
Ensuring an eco-social #fairstart in life for all kids can have ten to twenty times the long run impact on the key social and ecological crises we are facing today relative to other interventions.
It is the most effective and just thing we can do. And there is no justice without it.
How Can We GIVE ALL KIDS A FAIR START?
By enacting child-centered policies made to level the playing field and non-coercively incentivize
smaller and well-planned families, we can ensure every child a fair start in life.
We can move the discussion away from population and towards people, away from counting people and towards making people count.
WHen Communities and governments priotize a fair start in life as the first human right
We invest more in families and Help Parents be Ready, empowered, and positioned for success
Kids get a fair start and our future is protected
Pathways for specific and achievable metrics for each of these can be found here. These include standards for delay and readiness to avoid horrific cases of child abuse and neglect, provisions to transfer wealth from rich kids to poor kids to level their playing fields, and incentives to promote smaller families for everyone.
These are the basic building blocks of freedom for all.
What We Do
The Fair Start Movement is a collective of parents and young people, child advocates, activists, health practitioners, social scientists, ethicists, and institutions from a range of causes who come together to advance Fair Start efforts at the state, federal, and global level.
We advocate for informed, inclusive policies rather than ones focused on short-term and unsustainable economic growth with damaging ecological consequences. We call on those with a platform to speak out, from celebrities to those in governance. We also build our movement through a growing coalition of organizations. But most importantly, we empower young people and parents to share their stories and force accountability from those who oppose giving kids a fair start and threaten our and our children’s future.
Campaigns
Recent Blogs
There Is One True Political Border, Dividing the Just and Unjust. Take Action.
The greatest power we have over others is the power of creation, to create future generations - the majority of people - and shape their destinies. We do this through family planning policies, and practice, at the first border of human power. We can pursue policies...
How to See and Fix the Fundamental Mistake at the Heart of Our Climate, Inequality and Other Crises
There is a common mistake in all of our language and thinking that drives many of the crises we face today. Our brains have trouble perceiving how time and space interact, and this usually leads to bad long-term decision making. For example, we know promoting a...
The Scam of the Century, and Who to Target for Payback
Who has the most at stake when we have children? The children, given the impact on their lives. One would think, then, that in designing family planning systems our governments - which undertook that task in the mid-20th Century - would make them child-centric. They...
One Family Shares Their Story
A Mother’s Plea: Collective Planning
A Message from Fair Start Movement
Co-Director, Catharina Hughey
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