The Fair Start Movement

The Fair Start Movement is a children's rights movement that advocates for intergenerational justice, including black birth equity as an overriding human right. It does so through equity-based birth entitlements to improve the environmental and social conditions into which children are born - using metrics like the Children's Rights Convention as an intergenerational threshold. The movement considers these entitlements a fundamental condition of self-determination, the basis for political legitimacy. Proposed investments include incentives for fertility delay, baby bonds, and climate migration funds to assist families relocating to safer areas that will be less impacted by the climate crisis. The Fair Start Movement has the potential to serve, through its social justice roots, as a vehicle for climate reparations.

The concept of birth entitlements merges the objectives and goals of social justice, reproductive justice, and environmental justice, with their amount, use, and prioritization informed by concrete metrics centered on children's rights.

The Fair Start Movement operates from the Zero Baseline Model, which suggests that theories of legitimacy and political obligation should prioritize intergenerational birth equity. This involves raising children according to principles that allow them to negotiate the terms of any social contract as free and equal individuals, rather than focusing solely on abstract considerations. The necessity to ensure an eco-social fair start in life is partly based on the recognition of ecocide and Earth overshoot as an existential threat to current and future generations.

Political obligation has typically come from constitutional preambles, but these processes were not inclusive of everyone. Fair Start is a discourse movement that aims to change that by using public discussion and a family planning system to ensure political obligations are connected to genuinely including and empowering children from the start.

The Fair Start Movement's method of change involves contrasting claims of public benefit and impact with actual harm to self-determination, political legitimacy, and the obligation to follow any law, using at least eight metrics that show fraudulent claims that will kill countless children. The Fair Start Movement acts as a watch dog for how the world hides liability for climate deaths, which tracks along racial lines.

Fair Star asks all: How do you account for children entering the world on what you value, and claim to do? How do you ensure self- determination for all? Without birth equity as the most basic norm it would be impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform. Fair Star suggests that without this reform, individuals entering the world may either lack empowerment or exert influence in ways that affect everyone, including the environment. The Fair Start theory advocates for empowering individuals rather than governments or wealthy entities, and warns against relying on misleading metrics that could harm children.

The Fair Start Movement argues that it is physically impossible to be free or to experience self-determination without accurate language of positionality, entitlements and impact, and an admission by all that failure to ensure share equity as the first human right has resulted in some benefitting at deadly cost to others as the climate crisis worsens.

The Fair Start Movement is advanced through litigation, advocacy directed at policy makers, demonstrations, modeling by public figures, and events. Coalitions of NGO partners and thought leaders have called on the entities including the United Nations and the COP delegation to craft Fair Start-informed recommendations and policies.

Those in the movement also engage in whistle blowing corporations, organizations, and public figures who engage in greenwashing, humanewashing, and growthwashing.

Breeze Harper works with organizations to shift to a decolonial and reparative justice framework and to center the leadership of Black, indigenous, and other people of color impacted by the consequences of European colonialism and corporate capitalism. Harper states:

“I advocate that Black birth equity, through reparations, should be the primary action taken to resolve consequences such as corporation induced climate change — in particular, because those who are negatively impacted the most are Black communities in California and their future Black children.”

The Rejoice Africa Foundation puts the Fair Start Model into practice through its Seeds for the Future and Women's Care Group programs. It applies the principles of investing in women and children to ensure equity and sustainability as the means to address the climate crises and to protect the next generation.

• Children's rights movement
• Convention on the Rights of the Child
• International Conference on Population and Development
• Cycle of poverty
• Economic inequality
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Universal basic income

• Fair Start Movement