COMMON PURPOSE
A Movement to Renew America’s Promise
We, the people living now, have the responsibility to shape the future.—
A new Common Purpose—overcoming our national stagnation and elevating tens of millions of our neighbors from barely surviving to thriving—demands a movement to renew America’s Promise. It will be a fool’s errand if we cannot measure our actual success. The time for vague aspirations and unclear goals is over.
When outcomes are unclear or misleading, accountability dissolves and it is impossible to engage in debate, shift gears, and make the adjustments needed to avoid repeating the things that haven’t worked in the past. So, we must make a profound shift to an additional set of measures that truly reflect the lived experience of working Americans.
Clear metrics, with what constitutes thriving determined in advance, are an absolute requirement.
This is an Outcomes Movement, targeted and specific and based on a straightforward premise: Before launching any effort aimed at correcting the precarious situations in which so many Americans find themselves, it is communities—not outsiders—that must come together and identify where efforts should be focused and select the intended outcomes they want to improve in concrete, measurable, and realistic terms: “we aim to move x number of families from situation a to situation b between now and a date,” as in, say, we aim to move 500 families from paying 48 percent of their income on housing to paying less than 30 percent, and do it within three years.
This is how successful businesses operate; they employ standard performance indicators, with clear outcomes measures such as net income. This is what the military does when it continually updates its readiness based on capability metrics and its operations based on timely data. This is the norm in these and other sectors that establish objectives, set measures of success, and monitor and adjust based on those measures. It is time to apply the same logic and discipline to ensuring that working Americans thrive.
An Outcomes Movement is about creating ongoing dialogue, necessary transparency, and true accountability. It makes a statement of our values, of what we care about as a nation.
We as a country must begin to operate this way, starting with conversations in our communities across the country about what we can do to make genuine progress.
An Outcomes Movement isn’t about solving every problem in one fell swoop, but about getting America back on track. A focus on real and realistic outcomes is the key to creating a sensible direction, ongoing dialogue, the necessary transparency, disciplined action, and true accountability. And perhaps most importantly, it makes a statement of our values, of what we care about as a nation. It signals our renewed, shared Common Purpose.