Dear Roger Ali, MBA, C.Dir., CFRE and the AFP leadership,

The Fair Start movement is a loose network of advocates urging that measurable child equity become the universal and dominant measure of beneficial public interest work and national legitimacy. 

Our advocates have worked with several professional fundraisers over the years who systematically use a fraudulent equity and impact standard – claiming beneficial impacts for micro-level public interest work while omitting how the benefits are undone, upstream by macro-level and deeply inequitable growth. Often this is because the omission benefits those funding the work and the fundraisers they pay – e.g., alt-protein investors funding animal rights organizations that ignore the negative impact of growth on animals for example.

The result is the enrichment of some at deadly cost to others, and often at illegal cost given that the assessment and reporting is premised on violating a host of laws.    

This fundamental form of fraud explains why the children of so many philanthropists are wealthy and thriving, and the children meant to be protected by the charities they funded are much worse off. 

We are writing to begin a dialogue about the urgent need for AFP to initiate policy reforms to prevent equity and impact fraud, so that fundraising is premised on including in value assessments and reporting the largest an increasingly deleterious driver of outcomes across all philanthropic sectors: Growth.

Fair Start reforms

Fair Start reforms offer the most just and effective way to address many of today’s overlapping crises—but only if public-interest claims are evaluated using the right standard. Anyone claiming positive impact should be asked a basic question: How did your cost-benefit model account for children entering the world, and did it meet what those children’s legal rights, political equity, and national legitimacy require? In most cases, the answer is that it did not. There were no functional protections at birth, no value-based limitations of the creation of power relations to favor the vulnerable over the powerful.

Our modeling has been subject to near ten positive peer reviews.

Under current modeling, children are typically treated as economic inputs driving growth, while the ecological, political, and human costs of that growth are ignored or illegally discounted. This constitutes the use of fraudulent equity and impact standards, one that produces “free” wealth that depends on worsening conditions – especially for children of color – and contradicts the values advocates claim to hold, such as safety, equality, and sustainability. The result is continued overshoot of ecological and social thresholds that both humans and nonhumans need to survive. The wealth created by that standard, a massive concentration of mostly white wealth, today funds decoy micro-level public interest interventions that mask upstream undoing by macro growth.

 

 

Even a basic review of history will show women “liberated” by the United Nations “separate but equal” standard of treating having and not having children as a matter of personal autonomy (with parents taught to treat their children as means and not ends, generation after generation) now face dying in heat waves fundamentally driven by inequitable growth. Their predicament was worsened by low-impact social justice interventions, like attempts to eliminate greenwashing, that themselves used a definition of “green” and high permissible emissions geared to paltry early childhood development investments all meant to exploit growth and enrich the mostly white children of the funders backing the U.S environmental organizations, at deadly cost to millions of Africans.

Paul Shapiro’s history of moving from someone who influenced what it means to protect animals to a food industrialist benefiting from the growth economics and exploitative #birthpositionality is a an example of how the standard works.

Use of the standard – which derives from the maintenance of the racist “separate but equal” standard of the Twentieth Century, tucked away in reproductive rights regimes as a form of autonomy designed to gut political equity, is preempted by a variety of laws, and can be targeted as unfair competition under state law. How? Because vulnerable entities and those who represent them, like TruthAlliance.Global  – can’t compete with those who use the equity fraud model. Use of that standard constitutes the ongoing subversion of racial justice and other decolonial movements, and the hiding of collective liability for the deaths of millions as the democratic disenfranchisement and  climate crisis.

Anyone can spot the standard  of private benefit and public costs and its manufactured numbers using an AI-based XYZ analysis where claim X is assessed for how the cost/benefit modeling accounted for what children were owed as they entered the world (high levels of permissible harm v. self-determination, or zero), the largest factor altering the X claim to in fact be Z).

When confronted with these truths by TruthAlliance.global, many have just continued, hiding collective liability for the deaths of millions, and intentionally omitting the impacts of the largest driver.

Many others are admitting they benefited from a system of illegal birth inequity, and of systematic omission in assessments and impact reporting hiding that system, that did more harm to our values than we did good. Whistleblowers are coming out around the United States to lock arms with Africans, target the fundamental driver of the climate crisis and Trump himself, using the legal system in the United States to challenge “equity and impact fraud,” or assessments and claims of public impact that ignore birth equity as the key factor, and do so to illegally enrich some children at deadly cost to others.

They target decades of misleading public interest work that assumed that some children were worth much more than others, work that was always being undone by the political inequity of growth.

For our supporters we urge specific avenues – Take action: 1) Become a whistleblower and grassroots organizer with Truth Alliance, 2) demand truth and reconciliation with our Tell the Truth campaign, 3) urge your attorney general or other law enforcement  to seek a “legitimacy injunction” blocking use of the standard, and 4) back legitimacy certification for those who come forward and are willing to change accelerates. 

Thanks for considering this invitation to open dialogue,

Sincerely,

Suriya Khan and the Fair Start Team.