COMMON PURPOSE

There are distinct—and distinctly important—roles in an Outcomes Movement.

Community Members

Community members are the driving force. To start, communities will come together to form a collective group—a partnership between individuals, community and philanthropic organizations, and local government leaders—that will build a local Outcomes Movement. This group will engage community members to join in helping determine what issues to focus on and to select the outcomes to strive toward. The local Outcomes Movement will develop a dashboard. All of this shared work reflects the Common Purpose behind these efforts: more working Americans thriving. 

Community members will need to stay informed on the measures and where things stand. The dashboard will be key, helping engage the entire community to act and monitor whether the community is improving or falling behind—and putting the community in a position to hold leaders accountable for actual results.

Philanthropy

An Outcomes Movement opens a new avenue for foundations and individuals to move beyond the trap of incremental change by supporting communities to focus on outcomes. Philanthropy can offer catalytic help to communities to convene and select outcomes measures; help create the data infrastructure required and often impossible to fund; and build the mechanisms required for transparency that ensures accountability. Measurement may not be flashy, but philanthropy can be the rocket fuel that will thrust communities beyond aspiration into an actual Outcomes Movement.

Elected Officials and Government Agencies

We need our elected officials and government agencies to commit to the Outcomes Movement by working with their communities to select outcomes and then joining in the efforts to make progress on those outcomes. Done well, elected officials, government agencies (including school districts), and communities working hand-in-hand with transparency and accountability could very well help usher in a new era of trust in politicians and institutions.

Employers

Employers have an opportunity to contribute to an Outcomes Movement by understanding where their employees stand in the seven outcomes areas and ensuring they have the support needed to thrive—such as by providing health insurance, access to affordable childcare, and mental health services as well as connections to services that help with financial planning and securing an affordable home. The specifics will be different in different parts of the country, but there is no doubt participation will benefit employers in recruitment and retention of their workforce.

Media

An Outcomes Movement is big news, and media of all types will have an opportunity to play an important role by promoting dashboards, regularly reporting on stories that impact outcomes measures, and covering the human stories that shape the movement locally, regionally, and across the country. Media’s historic role of holding power to account will be a critical component of an Outcomes Movement’s success.

Coming Together in Common Purpose

An Outcomes Movement will not eliminate the disagreements that fuel our national discontent. Rather, it will elevate our disagreements in a productive way. Imagine debating—in good faith—which policies to adopt, programs to create, and public expenditures to make to improve reading proficiency, improve mental health, and reduce the cost burden of childcare—all based on having agreed to the outcomes measures on which we seek to make quantifiable progress. 

We cannot restore the American Promise without measurement. We cannot restore trust without transparency. We cannot restore unity without a shared understanding of what thriving looks like. The American Dream cannot remain a slogan. It must become our measurable Common Purpose once again—to be a society that cares for and about all its members. 

Restoring the aspirations and opportunity that made America great—restoring the American Dream—is an obligation we must accept. It will not be easy, especially in our complex, challenging, fast-paced, need-for-immediate-results world. But the Outcomes Movement proposed here—based on what we, in our communities, agree is the path to Americans thriving—is a far easier starting place than promises that end up being broken or trying to tackle everything that needs to be fixed all at once. 

We must go into this with patience and without any illusions. Building an Outcomes Movement across these great United States will require a fight not with arms, and not based on the divisions that are tearing apart the fabric of our great country, but with facts and data—having embraced, again, a Common Purpose to which we can all aspire, with shared hope for restoring the promise of America.