Join the movement helping communities thrive
Imagine a nation where working Americans aren’t just surviving – they are thriving. Where families earn living wages, maintain enough savings to get by if an emergency strikes, afford housing and childcare, and have time for their mental health and loved ones. Where communities track progress transparently and hold institutions and each other accountable to real results. Where we as a country judge ourselves by whether greater numbers of working Americans are thriving. This is an Outcomes Movement and together, we can unite around this Common Purpose.
The Finding Common Purpose Foundation (FCP) is building that Outcomes Movement. FCP partners with communities nationwide to select, track, and make progress on the outcomes that matter most to their community.
These outcomes measures below fall into seven clear, measurable outcomes areas that reflect the lived experience of tens of millions of working Americans. They offer a clear distinction between surviving and thriving.
- Wages – Earning enough to support a family in your community
- Savings – Having at least $400 in emergency savings
- Housing – Spending ≤30% of income on rent/mortgage
- Childcare – Spending ≤10% of income on childcare
- Healthcare – Spending ≤10% of income on healthcare
- Education – Children reading proficiently by 3rd grade
Get updates on how the Outcomes Movement is helping communities work together so more working Americans can thrive.
"*" indicates required fields
Finding Common Purpose
The Finding Common Purpose Foundation (FCP) is a philanthropic organization advancing the Outcomes Movement across America. FCP partners with communities, funders, employers, and leaders to build the infrastructure for change: community dashboards that track what matters, data systems that ensure transparency, and alignment around shared outcomes. Through this work, communities can define their vision of thriving and measure real progress.
The Outcomes Movement is already underway across America
The Vermont Futures Project developed an economic plan to address that largely rural state’s unsustainable future, with challenges such as an aging and shrinking workforce and rising cost of living.
With economic mobility for many Utahns stagnating, Utah Promise led a sustained, multiyear effort to codify into policy the shared, measurable outcome of more working Utahns thriving. The result was the Raising Expectations through Accountability, Community, and Hope (REACH) Initiative, which in March 2026 established the state’s first outcomes-based economic mobility framework.
In Kent County, KConnect works on third-grade reading proficiency, postsecondary-school educational success, basic family income, and a thriving family income. A “set of common indicators and metrics helps align the efforts” of the many partners in this work, and a publicly accessible Data Dashboard ensures that “everyone is working towards the same outcomes and can track progress collectively.”
United for Brownsville convenes families, schools, healthcare providers, and social services in Brooklyn around one mission: closing gaps in access to housing, early childhood education, and maternal health. Their FCP-supported dashboard tracks cradle-to-career outcomes and gives the whole community a shared picture of conditions on the ground.
The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet is working toward a single goal: connecting more than 5,000 young people and their families to postsecondary and economic opportunity by 2033. With FCP support, they built a community dashboard and developed a locally grounded thriving wage metric to make sure progress is measured honestly.
In the small community of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a locally led effort called Steamboat for All created an Affordable Housing Dashboard that measures how many households spend 30 percent or more of their income on housing, as well as other information related to the city’s policies and programs aimed at reducing that number in the near term.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Outcomes Movement is a coordinated, cross-sector effort where communities, philanthropies, governments, employers, and individuals align around shared, measurable goals to help working Americans thrive. Rather than funding programs without accountability, the Outcomes Movement defines what thriving means locally – like earning living wages, maintaining emergency savings, and affording housing and childcare – then tracks progress transparently to ensure real results.
The Outcomes Movement measures how working Americans are doing in at least seven core domains: wages, savings, housing costs, childcare costs, healthcare costs, education, and mental health. These are the outcomes areas where people fall through the cracks, and every one of them can be addressed at the community, state, and federal levels. With the Outcomes Movement, these outcomes and goals are identified and defined at the community level, then measured through publicly available dashboards, enabling transparent accountability and evidence-based progress.
You can get involved by:
- Reading and sharing the Common Purpose pamphlet
- Signing up for updates on the Outcomes Movement
- Connecting with Finding Common Purpose to explore partnerships
- Advocating locally for outcomes-based accountability
- Encouraging community conversations about what thriving looks like where you live
The Finding Common Purpose Foundation is a nonprofit grantmaking entity advancing the Outcomes Movement across the country. The organization partners with communities, philanthropies, employers, and leaders to align funding, data, and institutions around shared community priorities, leading to proven, sustained results in people’s lives.
Learn more at Finding Common PurposeCommon Purpose is a pamphlet in the spirit of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), which was a concise, accessible call to action that sparked national conversation 250 years ago. This pamphlet uses the same tradition: a clear, compelling argument for why Americans should unite around a new standard for measuring progress – where more working people are thriving, not just surviving.
Andrew Wolk has spent more than 20 years helping communities achieve better results on challenges that no single organization or sector can address alone. He authored Common Purpose and launched the Finding Common Purpose Foundation to advance a nonpartisan vision for an Outcomes Movement for working Americans.
