Fair Start Movement

Category: Press Releases & Updates

  • Fair Start and Truth Alliance File Notice of Preemptive Standards with the California Attorney General

    Fair Start and Truth Alliance File Notice of Preemptive Standards with the California Attorney General

    Today the Fair Start Movement and an emerging coalition called the Truth Alliance filed a notice of preemptive standards with the California Attorney General seeking full justice in matters, like consumer fraud, impacting the futures of the most vulnerable children.

    A New Standard for Justice in California

    The Fair Start Movement has called on the California Attorney General to recognize that existing fraud and similar laws are preempted by what the organization describes as the “full justice” standard. This standard is now before the African Union and asserts that true empowerment requires ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of resources necessary for freedom and self-determination.

    Why Equitywashing Is the Core Problem

    As the Fair Start Movement has argued in its foundational works, including Illegitimate Power, Illegitimate Violence: How Nations Are Built on the Backs of Disenfranchised Children, conventional legal and policy systems ignore the inequities at birth that drive global crises. This omission leads to political equitywashing, where claims of progress in areas such as climate or human rights obscure the fact that children continue to enter the world in conditions of radical injustice.

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

     

    The use of the equity fraud standards has meant treating children of color – for decades – as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk. As such, the standard gutted equity, or each person’s equal capacity to influence one’s political system and the outcomes that affect one’s life. That policy has led to millions of deaths in the climate and underlying crises, and the undoing of a lot of the value many claimed to create and the beneficial impacts they had.

    This is equity fraud, ensuring the assumption that our birth relations empower us, and in a sufficiently legitimate way to define things like the “green” in greenwashing laws or concepts like animal liberation, when in fact the standards are hardly green or liberating in the sense of what the most vulnerable children and animals need, but rather designed to enrich some at cost to others. Activists were comparing themselves to the worst actors rather than what was necessary to achieve their ends on balance, thus ensuring a race to the bottom.

     

    Family Planning info card

     

    Empowerment as the Basis of Legitimacy

    Fair Start’s letter to the California Attorney General emphasizes that governmental and corporate authority cannot be legitimate if it is not conditioned on empowering those it claims to represent. By centering child equity in all claims of value, impact, and legality, the Fair Start Movement argues that freedom and justice must be defined not as an absence of state coercion but as true consent to any external influence—a consent impossible without equitable starts in life.

    According to Mwesigye Robert, who helps lead a growing coalition called Truth Alliance that demands those making value and impact claims actually account for the preemptive need to ensure children entering the world are measurably empowered: “Positionality matters, children from the global south deserve to be seen as equal in dignity and opportunity and when global policies reflect that equity, their voice potential can truly be heard in highlighting the need for fairness in family planning and development funding.”

     

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

     

    Fair Start Movement

    The Fair Start Movement is the only organization connecting the root causes of the climate crisis, inequality, and illegitimate governance to the fundamental issue of inequitable births. Their legal advocacy, including direct appeals to the California Attorney General, marks a groundbreaking step toward transforming systems of law and policy.

    If legitimate governance, including the authority to assign wealth, derives from empowering the people, then we all have preemptive right to ensure businesses treat the violation of children’s birthrights as a horrific cost, and not a benefit to be exploited for growth.

  • Update: Coca-Cola and Fairlife, Recently Caught Engaging in Horrific Cruelty, Should Tell the Truth.

    Update: Coca-Cola and Fairlife, Recently Caught Engaging in Horrific Cruelty, Should Tell the Truth.

    This blog was originally published March 18, 2025, when Fair Start assisted with the filing of a lawsuit against Coke/Fairliife. 

    After the filing, Fair Start and TruthAlliance.global filed a notice of preemptive standards with the California Attorney General. 

    More here: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fair-start-movement-urges-california-attorney-general-to-recognize-full-justice-standard-as-preemptive-of-fraud-claims-1035104323

    We are now submitting this with a request to the California Attorney General to intervene in the litigation, using the standard we have identified. 

    Published March 18, 2025:

    Fairlife, owned by Coca-Cola, is using milk supplied by dairy farms that abuse animals and pollute the waterways.

    Fair Start Movement activists are assisting Animal Recovery Mission and others in holding the companies accountable. How?

    Coke/Fairlife used an illegal standard/business model fundamentally designed to illegally harm children and animals by exploiting their vulnerability and undo the value Coke/Fairlife claimed to create in a way that risks millions of lives and will cost businesses trillions of dollars.

    The standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single largest driver of the harms we see in the case, and it begins with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable. That’s illegal.

    The standard is illegally benchmarked around the needs of the wealthy children of leadership, at deadly cost to vulnerable children using a false assessment and reporting system. This means making up numbers that hide the damage being done. 

    Coke/Fairlife should start fixing this by admitting that they benefitted from an equitywashing system, that through inequitable growth, illegally violated children’s birthright to political equity, and did more harm to their advertised values and impacts than they did to further them. By doing so, the companies can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others.

    That anthrocentric and unsustainable standard is the largest single variable causing the harm, and it hides harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels. It hides the fact that we have a moral and legal duty to move Coke’s extreme wealth, made at illegal and deadly climatological and other costs to children, or suffer the consequences of continuing to let those kids die. 

    We can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it — that’s fraud.

    The standard is the fundamental reason their leadership is being enriched at deadly cost to mostly children of color. This goes beyond greenwashing and humanewashing to a more fundamental system of equitywashing that subverts civil rights and democracy and allows free-riding benefits at costs to others. They are using the same fundamentally false standard derived from the “separate but equal” twentieth-century subversion of racial justice movements and the hiding of liability inherent in generational white wealth that is causing our current ecological and political crises. 

    Equity is a state of empowerment to allow us to accurately and fairly determine what is “green” and “humane.

    The standard has been used by many of the public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries like animal agriculture, entities that, like those industries, use performative interventions that do more to protect generational wealth for their biggest funders than to accomplish their missions.

    Many start their work by discounting the lives of future animals and infants, in contravention of their stated causes. Many animal rights and law organizations have challenged the idea that animals are property at a micro and mostly performative level, but their acceptance of it at a macro level has done way more harm to animals than they have done good, given the way their out-of-context impact and values claims have for decades hidden this larger issue. 

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

    The Coke/Fairlife standard is designed to:

    We can ask Coke/Fairlife, the charities they back, as well as the charities that engaged for decades in a charade of opposing entities like Coke/Fairlife, the same questions: 

    How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?

    Climate reparations owed by those who used the illegal standard are a form of self-defense, and the obligation to pay them should fall on the adult children of the wealthy until justice is done.

    I think the below starts to answer the question. Shall we bring out today, as I add a section using this https://fairstartmovement.org/coca-cola-and-fairlife-recently-caught-engaging-in-horrific-cruelty-should-tell-the-truth/ and this

    Measuring the costs of illegitimacy. 

    Central to the economics literature on climate change is the Social Cost of Carbon. This is a calculation that attempts to assign a price to the wellbeing lost for every ton of Carbon emitted. It has been shown that these estimates are highly sensitive to the discount rate used to model damages. For example, decreasing the discount rate from 5% to 2.5% often increases the estimated damages by a factor of 5. 

    Please consider making a contribution here to further the work of Fair Start: Donate.

    Together, we can create lasting change to save the next generations.

     

     

     

  • UPDATE: VALUING NEGLECTED COMMUNITIES AND GENDER IN ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH.

    UPDATE: VALUING NEGLECTED COMMUNITIES AND GENDER IN ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH.

    The climate crisis is not a distant threat, it’s is an urgent challenge for all of us, particularly in global south where vulnerable communities bear the brunt of climate crisis and inequalities impacts. As the world going with rising temperatures, resource depletion and extreme weather changes, Addressing systemic errors in climate solutions is vital to ensure a sustainable future for coming generations. A critical step that involves valuing neglected communities and integrating gender perspectives into climate action strategies.

    Why neglected communities matter?

    Neglected communities often on the fringes of mainstream development efforts possess valuable local knowledge and resilience. Indigenous populations, rural women and marginalized urban dwellers frequently adapt to environmental changes using sustainable practices passed down through generations. However, voices are often excluded from policymaking, leading to top-down solutions that fail to address unique challenges in today’s generation. Acknowledging these communities as partners rather than beneficiaries can drive more inclusive and effective climate action.

    People sitting around in a circle, a neglected community

     

    The role of gender in climate solutions. Gender disparities exacerbate vulnerabilities to climate change especially for women in the global south. Women carry responsibilities for water collection, food production, Care  giving disproportion affected by drought, floods, resource scarcity. Remain underrepresented in decision making spaces like COPs. Empowering women and integrated gender responsive approaches can enhance equalities. Women Care groups in doing kitchen gardens, Agroforestry, animal protection, child saving and family planning as per fair Start standards have demonstrated innovative solutions and creativity to address the needs and climate restoration, food security, small family planning, child bonds and fair Start standards for families in the neglected communities from global south to save next generations.

     

    Addressing systemic errors

    Systemic errors in current climate interventions rooted from treating global south as a homogeneous group and ignoring the intersection of social-economic, culture, political, environmental factors based on

    1. Participatory Approaches; policies must involve marginalized communities and ensure addressed concerns to the solutions.
    2. Gender Equity; Funding and programs must prioritize women Care group model in climate restoration and adoption of Fair Start Movement standards
    3. Decentralization; once top bottom system is changed to use bottom – up, cultures and indigenous knowledge can be valued in reshaping model.

     

     

    People planting vegetables

     

    A collective Responsibility.

    Valuing neglected communities and gender in climate strategies is not a moral imperative but should be practical necessity. As global citizens, we must ensure Fair Start standards to advocate equality and equity in climate actions whereby most vulnerable communities have access to resources and voices hard and recognized in order to strive for the better future.

    Few leaders/wealth people that make small percentage on this world should not decide on the behalf of voiceless and neglected communities from global south.

    Call to Tell the Truth 

    In 2019, I came in to decentralize power of the system, I made a statement “The fight for climate change is not just a fight for only environmental degradation but also includes a fight for equality, justice and the rights to a future for every child, woman and men at forefront communities who deserve to be saved, empowered and voices Heard at international level because are affected more yet contribute less to the damage”

    That’s because for many years I used system not inverting the power of the system to decentralize I used Village Health Team (VHT) system while working in the refugee settlement to address health challenges in the community in accessing public health and it was not in decent razing the power to women in addressing climate crisis and food insecurity that’s why I started using Women Care Groups in decentralization and address the cause of climate change not signs and symptoms.

     

    Carter hiding in liberating animals using illegal standards here is the key false claim of Carter in 2016 and now is backing Women Care groups. What I did was similar to what Carter did in hiding the undoing of the liberation of animals.

     

     

    Infographic comparing Top Down Power vs. Bottom Up Empowerment for birth equity, listing social impacts of each approach—including potential risks like legitimacywashing when using top-down strategies. Includes icons of people, scales, graduation cap, and supportive hands.

     

    COPs is failing to center climate Reparations and justice for neglected gender and communities to Fair Start standards.

    The conference of Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has become a global stage for negotiations on climate actions. Year after year, these conferences are criticized for failing to address the root cause of climate injustice at neglected communities and gender who are most vulnerable to the climate crisis. This failure is from lack of meaningful engagement and admitting the truth and putting structures of climate reparations in equitable manner and decentralized focused solutions. This failure undermines efforts to adhere to Fair Start Movement standards that prioritizes intergenerational justice and equity for future generations.

    Damages/harms caused by wealthy people/nations are often the largest polluters from global north on the global south. Despite decades of advocacy, COPs have consistently omitted financial commitments to reparations, instead offering vague pledges that rarely translate into actionable changes.

    Without clear structure reparations, vulnerable communities and gender from the global south with least responsibility for the climate crisis are left to bear the brunt of the effects. Failing to address these imbalances perpetuates cycles of inequality and extinction of next generations.

    Omission of decentralization at COPs

    Fair Start Movement emphasizes that true climate justice begins at community level (Decentralization) as based on the Afrocentric model. Indigenous women and local communities possess valuable knowledge about sustainable practices and ecosystem management whereas COPs negotiations frequently prioritize profit based solutions like carbon trading over nonprofit Decentralization systemic approach.

    Impacts on black Americans in the system of white supremacy. Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is a social justice issue disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. For black Americans, the overlapping crises of climate change and systemic racism within a white supremacist structure amplify existing inequalities and create unique vulnerability.

     

    Infographic titled Inequality and the Climate Crisis: How did we get here? with text blocks explaining causes like prioritizing economy over rights, disenfranchisement, ignoring the 1/10th wealth gap, and impacts on families. It also highlights how practices such as legitimacywashing contribute to the problem by masking systemic failures under a veneer of responsibility.

    Climate change and environmental Racism

    Black communities in America have been systematically neglected from wealthy building opportunities and relegated to neighborhoods with higher exposure to environmental harsh conditions. Industrial plants, landfills and highways are often located near predominantly black communities, leading to chronic health conditions such as Asthma, Allergies and others. Climate change exacerbates inequalities by intensifying extreme weather changes such hurricanes, heat waves and flooding in poor household air-conditioning.

    In 2005, During Hurricane Katrina, more black residents of New Orleans were disproportionately affected. Many lived in low lying geographic areas more prone to flooding, lacked access to reliable transportation to evacuate and faced systemic neglect in disaster response and these results are not accidental but are results of policies shaped by white supremacy.

    Economic injustice and climate vulnerability. The racial wealth gap leaves black Americans with fewer resources to recover from climate related disasters. Generations of poverty redlining and discriminatory practices in housing and lending have left many black families without adequate child bonds. The economic insecurity increases challenges of displacement, job loss and homelessness a rising from climate injustices and inequalities.

    A voice from the voiceless: women care group leaders of western Uganda Speak to the global north.

    People planting vegetables

    “We are the women of western Uganda, members of women care groups, mothers, farmers and protectors of life. We speak not just for ourselves but for our children and the land we nurture. We are voice of voiceless, calling on you leaders and funders of global north to listen to our cry as the climate crisis tightens its grip on our lives. The rivers we once relied upon are drying. The rains we depended on to grow food come too late or too hard destroying our crops. The land we call home which we have cared for like a mother cares for her child is cracking and drying under the weight of this climate crisis and the world looks away.  We, the women, feel this crisis most deeply. When water sources dry up, we walk longer distances to fetch water. When crops fail, it is our children who go to bed hungry. When mosquitoes grow, it’s our children who suffer from Malaria and some die. When disasters strike, it is on our hand to rebuild homes and lives and often with no support or recognition. The inequality is increasing, while we suffer the consequences of climate change. Knowing that the emissions driving this catastrophe come far away from factories, industries and lifestyles in the global north. We contribute the least yet we pay the highest price. We ask you global north leaders and funders: how can it be just our lives, our communities, our future sacrificed so others can prosper? How can you speak of justice while our cries are ignored? We are not just victims, we are also part of the solution but feel neglected at decision making, We may be neglected now but we are not powerless. We are speaking now and we will keep speaking until our voices are heard. Leaders of the global north, Funders and policymakers; will you hear us? Will you stand with us or will you turn away?”

    The truth needs to be heard from you and shame the devil.

    Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

     

  • Fair Start Files Update to Our United Nations Human Rights Council Petition: Our Overriding Human Right to Nature and Equity

    Fair Start Files Update to Our United Nations Human Rights Council Petition: Our Overriding Human Right to Nature and Equity

    Yesterday the Fair Start Movement filed an update to its original “Fair Start” filing before the United Nations Human Rights Council. We updated our complaint because of the acceleration of the climate crisis, and the failure of governments around the world to respond to the crisis.

    The complaint and update make a few simple demands:

    • First, the United Nations must treat the correct interpretation of universal family policies (which should require climate restoration through birth equity redistribution of wealth in the form of family planning entitlements) as the fundamental and overriding human right.
    • Second, to admit that the United Nations failure to do this previously led to the climate and inequity crises we face today, including violations of future generations’ right to have children in safe and natural environments, and for that right to be safeguarded in perpetuity.
    • Third, to endorse loss and damage payments as overriding property rights, if used for the family planning entitlements described above.

    The original UN Human Rights Council petition can be found here, and our updated filing can be found here.

    Put simply: There is a universal human right that overrides domestic climate policies – most of which are anthropocentric and insufficient – in part because climate emissions do not respect borders and the “business as usual” approaches most governments and groups use disproportionately harm the peoples and nations least responsible for the crisis.

    Infographic explaining Fair Start impacts: Smaller families are 20x more effective at reducing climate impact. One million species face extinction. By 2100, population may double. Early childhood programs offer 13% ROI; family planning yields 600% ROI.
    Be effective.

    As the update argues:

    One clear step towards compliance with the best interpretation of Article 16 (the right to found a family) would be to urge that programming around the education of young women – throughout the world – begin with ensuring they know that all children’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life (defined by concrete climate restoration and birth equity measures) – now and for generations to come – overrides all competing rights and interests as the first and peremptory human right, including any conflicting property rights.

    That right should be the standard or baseline for, and the priority use of, evolving loss and damage payments.

    Take Action: Urge the UN Secretary General to support our claim.

  • Fair Start Report: Why wait until children are harmed before we act?

    Fair Start Report: Why wait until children are harmed before we act?

    Having Kids unveiled the Fair Start Order campaign in late 2017 and began petitioning state agencies to consider Fair Start Orders and legislation in 2018. We monitor the news for child abuse coverage and strategically select particularly egregious cases to target for Fair Start Orders. So far, we have campaigned for five states to adopt Fair Start Orders, offering our professional in-depth assistance.

    Our new report: Time to Get Serious About Preventing Child Abuse? lays out why we chose those states and what’s happened there since we offered our help. The report also considers the future of the Fair Start Order campaign and how we can best help protect children from child abuse.

    Don’t we have a duty to ensure that children are not subjected to abuse by known offenders? Having Kids advocates for Fair Start judicial orders in cases of criminal abuse and neglect. Fair Start orders prevent abusers from having, and thereby harming, additional children as a condition of probation. These child-centered judicial orders are noncoercive, progressive, constitutional and reflect all five aspects of the Fair Start model. Child abuse presents an ideal context in which to begin the remodeling of our family planning systems. Fair Start orders do more than prevent child abuse. They allow parents to focus on rehabilitation so that they can be ready and capable of providing kids with a safe and supportive environment.

    Take Action Today

    You can help us prevent child abuse on a national level by contacting senate committee members and telling them that you support Having Kids’ proposal for a Fair Start amendment to the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act.

    Email Ranking Member senator Patty Murray

  • Having Kids Partners On Animal Impact Calculator

    Having Kids Partners On Animal Impact Calculator

    Despite declining fertility rates in the US and a handful of other countries, our population is on track to grow exponentially in the coming decades. At the same time, Earth has entered the sixth mass extinction. It is one that rivals the extermination of the dinosaurs and 76% of life on Earth. However, unlike past extinction events caused by natural global pulses, humans have already caused the extinction of nearly 60% of wildlife. And these trends are accelerating (1). 

    Animals are disappearing and humans are to blame. 

    We will fail our children and future generations if we do not take significant action to mitigate our impact on the planet and wildlife.

    The vast and detrimental changes to Earth’s ecosystems are largely to meet our rapidly growing need for food, fresh water, timber, fiber, minerals, and fuel. They are the result of irresponsible human overpopulation, consumption, and a false-dependency on economic growth (2). It is becoming alarmingly clear that the demand we put on the planet is unsustainable. Although there are been substantial gains in human physical well-being and economic development for a few, the long-term costs are now being experienced in the form of climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, disease, war, displacement, hunger, and mass mortality in humans and nearly all other life forms (3)

    But effective change cannot happen without an informed scientific assessment to guide those strategies. That is why Having Kids is partnering with the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver to research individual impact on other species. Dr. Sarah M. Bexell is serving as the principal investigator on the project titled, the Animal Mortality Footprint Calculator.

    A similar tool has been developed to assess human individual impacts on the natural environment as a whole through the Ecological Footprint Calculator. And while estimates are available about the number of animals typically consumed for food, which measures in the billions in the U.S. alone, this research will go further to consider the cost to other species. The project will develop the algorithms to calculate the average number of animals that die to support the lifestyle of one human individual.

    This information will make a clear case to policymakers, economists, conservationists, environmental and social scientists, the philanthropic community, local communities, and citizens of the urgent need for consequential behavior change in terms of family planning and family size. The Animal Mortality Footprint Calculator will expose the inescapable truth of the direct impact that each person imposes on the most vulnerable beings.

    We know that choosing smaller families is the best way to protect for all animals, including humans.

    Unfortunately, the animal protection community has largely avoided that fact. A key aim of this project is to increase support of the Fair Start Model of family planning by animal advocates as well as communities everywhere.

    We must start a larger conversation on the choice to have smaller families size to protect biodiversity and the planet, and to reduce animal suffering caused by human activity. Sustainable family planning creates a path forward to a habitable world for all kids and animals.

    We will share updates as this research progresses. In the meantime, add your name to our open letter to the U.N, and learn more about the impact of humans on animals.

    1. WWF, 2016
    2. Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; WWF, 2014; 2016
    3. e.g., Ceballos, et al., 2015; Cohen, et. al., 2017; Dockery & Evans, 2017; Raworth, 2012; Rockstrom et al., 2009

     

  • Having Kids Announces Sustainable Families Campaign

    Having Kids Announces Sustainable Families Campaign

    Having Kids is urging families to come together in support of a new family planning model that puts children first and to speak out about their choices. The Sustainable Families campaign promotes smaller and more sustainable families, and a move towards cooperative family planning designed to give every child a fair start in life.

    Erika Mathews and her partner have chosen a smaller and more sustainable family, where they can invest more time, love, and energy in their daughter, as well as in their community. Erika and her family are leading by example, and building a better future for all.

    The Phelps-Mathews Family
    The Phelps-Mathews Family

    The facts are clear:

    Having Kids has come under fire recently for promoting better family planning. The debate over family planning models pits traditional forms of family planning, where some benefit from a growing population, massive inequality and dysfunctional democracies, against everyday families who take a child-first and values-centered approach to having kids. The two models would create vastly different futures, based on whether we use kids to fuel our economy or invest in them.

    “Family planning, more than anything else, determines the future,” said Anne Green, Executive Director of Having Kids. “Parents often say they will do anything to protect their kids. If that’s the case they should join us and speak out.”

    Interested in becoming a Sustainable Family and speaking out? Write us today at Info@HavingKids.org.