BOSTON, June 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary but many working Americans struggle to achieve the American Dream, social entrepreneur and philanthropist Andrew Wolk is calling for a national “Outcomes Movement” to measure whether working Americans can afford the basics and build stable lives.
Inspired by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which helped galvanize Americans around the cause of independence, Wolk’s Common Purpose pamphlet argues that America’s traditional measures of success — such as gross domestic product and the stock market — too often obscure the lived reality of working families. While headline indicators may suggest national prosperity, tens of millions of Americans who work full time still struggle to afford housing, childcare and healthcare, and are unable to save and build a stable life.
The release comes at a moment of stark contrast: the United States now has its first trillionaire, even as roughly 44 percent of full-time workers earn less than they need to cover basic living costs.
“America does not lack ambition, innovation, wealth or global success,” said Wolk, who also founded the Finding Common Purpose Foundation. “But if working people are more often surviving rather than thriving, our national scoreboard of success is incomplete. We can’t debate what to do if we don’t measure honestly.”
Common Purpose calls for an Outcomes Movement: a nationwide, community-level effort to define, measure and publicly track outcomes that show whether working Americans are thriving — not merely surviving. The pamphlet identifies seven core domains for measurement: wages, savings, housing costs, childcare costs, healthcare costs, education, and mental health.
Rather than prescribing a single partisan policy agenda, the pamphlet urges communities to set clear, locally rooted goals — such as reducing the share of families who are housing-burdened, increasing the percentage of workers earning enough to meet basic needs, improving third-grade reading, or helping more households build emergency savings — and to publish progress through transparent public dashboards, which provides the foundation for dialogue on what to do.
An Outcomes Movement is already emerging in communities and states across the country. In Kent County, Michigan, local groups have aligned around outcomes such as kindergarten readiness and family income. In Vermont, a public dashboard tracks progress toward goals included in the state’s economic plan. In Utah, the newly created REACH initiative — Raising Expectations through Accountability, Community, and Hope — is establishing an outcomes-based economic mobility framework to help move working families toward stability.
In Common Purpose, Andrew Wolk calls on philanthropists, civic leaders, employers, elected officials and community members to help expand the Outcomes Movement nationwide. This includes the launch of an outcomes fund at the Finding Common Purpose Foundation to support communities in selecting outcomes that matter to them and building a dashboard that creates the space for discussion, transparency and accountability that is required to track progress in real time.
“Common Purpose encourages us to ask a simple but critical question: Does the American Dream still work for people who work?” said Paul Reville, Professor and Founding Faculty Director of EdRedesign Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “If the answer is uncertain, the response should not be despair. It should be determination to take action: first, to measuring whether our society fulfills the promise of equal opportunity by providing the basic living conditions necessary for families to live with stability, dignity and hope; and secondly, if we fall short, taking action to fill the gap.”
The pamphlet is available at readcommonpurpose.org.
About Finding Common Purpose
Finding Common Purpose is a nonprofit grantmaking entity that advances the Outcomes Movement by providing funding and partnership to communities that are committed to sharing measurable outcomes and aligning local efforts so that working Americans can thrive, not just survive. Learn more at findingcommonpurpose.org.
Allie McKay Chamberlin Finding Common Purpose 3147490408 allie.chamberlin@omc.com