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.
It is the most effective and just thing we can do with impacts well beyond downstream alternatives.
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
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 Lie at the Base of Our Language Creating the Climate Crisis
The Lie Older generations lied to themselves and others by treating the most interpersonal act - having kids - as a matter personal and private to the parents, isolating those parents in the decision-making process from the impact their decision has on the children...
Fair Start: An Open Letter to Pope Francis
Your Holiness, We laud your many commitments to social justice and environmental protection. You are bending the arc of the world towards justice in a way few voices can. And while you have been criticized for your recent comments regarding the need to parent...
Worried About Having Children in the Climate Crisis? Brooke Morales Speaks Out
The UN has been obligated to interpret the promise of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that of a right "to found a family," in a way that would protect the right for all generations equally. This includes those in the middle of the Twentieth...
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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