COMMON PURPOSE

Imagine an Outcomes Movement having taken root in a not-too-distant future. 

Alma, a mostly stay-at-home mom with two kids, lives in a working-class suburb of Chicago. She works a part-time clerical job while her kids are in school—her wages helping supplement the income of her overextended husband Dave. He works in a college facilities department full-time and on weekends at a big-box home improvement store.

She and Dave keep things afloat, but she dreads the future her kids face. Housing takes more than 40 percent of the family’s income, and they sometimes feel they can barely keep up. 

Alma attended a meeting at her daughter’s school about a statewide Outcomes Movement effort, where they discussed tackling challenges like hers, and even a concentrated effort to reduce the percentage of income spent on housing across her town to a more manageable 25 percent. The meeting energized her and she decided to get involved—and now Alma spends some of her evening time helping residents secure more affordable housing and calling her local state senator and representative to hold them accountable to the policy commitments they’ve made. 

In one large Texas city, a dashboard is now a core part of how everyone—not only the mayor and city council members, but employers, community organizations, individual residents, and others—tracks the progress being made toward outcomes measures for people to thrive. It’s become common for people to hold up screenshots at local meetings and hearings where efforts continue to be debated, adjustments are made, and accountability is put on the line. 

A two-term state representative from one of West Virginia’s poorest counties, running for reelection, has made outcomes a core part of her campaign. Her promise isn’t that she can singlehandedly fix the cost of living that’s crippling so many of her low-wage constituents. She does promise to devote the first three months of her next term to holding community dialogues that lead to decision-making about which outcomes areas to begin addressing and the measures to gauge progress. And she commits to having a dashboard fully accessible to everyone—even arranging for it to be hosted on a county website—to ensure accountability, including her own. 

It is no small undertaking to create an Outcomes Movement that becomes something more than just another “program” with little genuine, widespread impact on people’s lives. But it won’t be the first time we Americans have done big, difficult things that matter, and done them swiftly and with resolve. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, our government mobilized the full power of our scientific institutions, private sector, and public agencies in “Operation Warp Speed” to develop vaccines—a process that typically takes a decade or longer. The COVID vaccines were developed in record time—less than 11 months—not because the problem was easy to solve, but because there was a national will to do so.

It demonstrates that when we define a clear outcome and align resources toward achieving it, America and Americans can still do great things. 

The challenge before us now is a significant one. The loss of the American Dream—under siege from unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, underperforming schools, untreated mental illness, and communities divided against themselves—spells catastrophe for individuals, families, and for our country as a whole. A nation that cannot provide the opportunity for its people to thrive cannot count on indefinite stability, but rather can expect rupture. 

That is the cost of doing nothing. 

We cannot and should not accept stagnation for our country. We cannot and should not surrender to the disappearance of the American Dream. We must build an Outcomes Movement at “warp speed,” before time runs out to propel our country forward. 

Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch. There are signs in many places that an emerging Outcomes Movement can already be found. 

Through a two-year community engagement process, the Vermont Futures Project developed an economic plan to address that largely rural state’s unsustainable future, with its aging population, rising cost of living, shrinking workforce, and other economic challenges. The project uses a public dashboard to show how the plan’s initiatives are progressing. 

Utah entered 2026 with a troubling reality: despite a strong economy, economic mobility for many Utahns had stagnated for decades, and no statewide infrastructure existed to align around a shared, measurable outcome of more working Utahns thriving. To that end, community-driven Utah’s Promise led a sustained, multiyear advocacy effort to translate that shared outcome into state policy, culminating in the legislature creating the REACH initiative (Raising Expectations through Accountability, Community, and Hope) in March 2026 to move families toward economic stability, establishing the state’s first outcomes-based economic mobility framework. 

In Kent County, Michigan, home of the city of Grand Rapids, KConnect works on third-grade reading proficiency, post-secondary-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.” 

The state of Louisiana illustrates what happens when people already in leadership positions take responsibility and move on tackling problems an Outcomes Movement would address. In 2019, the state ranked third from last in the country in fourth-grade reading proficiency, and had no consistent way to measure whether students in the earlier grades were on track to read at grade level. Then across the state, elected representatives, school systems, and educators aligned on ensuring more children could read proficiently by the end of third grade—adopting a common curriculum, investing in teacher training, and implementing consistent, statewide measures to monitor progress. Data helped guide instruction and improvement. As a result, Louisiana has made some of the fastest gains in early literacy in the country—a 10-point increase in the percentage of third-graders reading at grade level in only four years, and a rise to 15th in the nation in this metric. It’s a remarkable demonstration of what selecting an outcomes measure and aligning institutions and resources toward improvement looks like. 

Even in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a small Rocky Mountain city of 14,000 people, an Outcomes Movement is unfolding. There, the city’s website hosts an Affordable Housing Dashboard that is part of a locally led effort called Steamboat for All. It measures how many households spend 30 percent or more of their income on housing—which is the majority of both renters and those with mortgages—as well as other information related to the city’s policies and programs aimed at reducing that number in the near term. 

As these examples illustrate, America is not a country that lacks ingenuity. We are not a people lacking in resources. We are not a nation incapable of coordinated action. We have it within our history and our present day to act together with Common Purpose. We just need the will to do that coast to coast. 

An Outcomes Movement is practical: define what matters; measure it publicly; align around it; adjust when it fails; and persist when it shows genuine progress. An Outcomes Movement provides a disciplined way to define what thriving means, measure it honestly, and align effort toward it; to transform vague aspiration into measurable obligation; to make visible what must change and whether change is occurring. The tools, data, capacity, and resources already exist. 

An Outcomes Movement is possible, but only with real effort and genuine will. It will require civic conversation; elected officials who prioritize outcomes over rhetoric; institutions that align around shared measures; and community members who demand transparency and remain engaged.

Imagine an Outcomes Movement’s renewal of the American Promise—an America where once again, in the big cities and the great rural swaths of our country, working hard is a path toward a comfortable life.

Imagine how it would change the lives of Americans like the ones we met earlier. Imagine an Outcomes Movement in Kayla’s rural North Carolina that has firmly established the affordability of childcare as a civic responsibility assured by government, employers, and the taxpayers who insisted on it with their engagement and their votes. Imagine the school districts around Denver, where Henry once worked, teeming with dedicated young teachers fulfilling their dreams of shaping young minds, secure in the knowledge that they can focus on lessons without worrying about making ends meet or abandoning their students for new, higher-paying corporate jobs or exhausting themselves with second and third jobs. 

Our future depends on us choosing to resurrect the American Dream and make it broadly attainable again. Americans cannot wait for others to make this happen. We must demand it of ourselves, and ask our leaders and our institutions to join us. 

In the third edition of Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Two hundred and fifty years later, that power remains, not because circumstances are easy or because division is absent, but because we Americans have it within our history to act together, and we still possess the capacity to do so. 

An Outcomes Movement will be a statement of what we care about and what our nation values. It could spell a powerful start to restoring trust in our country and our institutions. It could be the beginning of putting the “system” back to work for us. And with that, it could reverse our polarization and bring us back together as a people. 

The question is not whether we can restore the American Promise, as the place where working Americans thrive, but whether we will try together in Common Purpose.

Andrew Wolk, author of this pamphlet, is the founder of the Finding Common Purpose Foundation. Read more about Andrew at www.readcommonpurpose.org/author. 

Links to sources of specific data presented in this pamphlet are available at www.readcommonpurpose.org/references.

© 2026 Andrew Wolk. All rights reserved.