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?
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 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 with
parents choosing smaller and well-planned families, we can ensure every child a fair start in life.
Parents who plan, and wait to be ready before having kids.
Communities and governments who ensure resources to give all kids a fair start.
Small, sustainable Families who make it all possible.
When communities and parents embrace smaller and more equitable families, those communities and families are able to sustainably invest more resources in every child and create the future children deserve.
Pathways for specific and achievable metrics for each of these can be found here.
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
The Constitutive Fallacy: We Cannot Achieve justice and the Freedom It Brings After Power Relations Have Already Formed
Systems of governance and their laws derive from people, who derive from their creation. Justice (distributive, procedural, retributive, ecological, intergenerational, etc.) and the rule law therefore begin in the dynamic formation of our first relations, or ideally,...
Calling for Voices: Think Your Future Child Deserves a Fair Start?
This past Fourth of July, two everyday people Cassie and Matt - exemplified what it would mean to constitute communities that are actually free, in part by compensating future generations for the harm we have caused them through the climate, inequity and other...
Orgs Are Speaking Out on Smaller Families, and It’s Having an Impact
Kudos to Fair Start Movement coalition member, Population Matters for bringing attention to the topic of smaller families. The group awarded $695 to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to be gifted to the charity of their choice, for making the decision to limit their...
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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