The old adage is true: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Businesses, the military, families — none can survive on good intentions alone. Families cannot budget with good intentions. Schools, charities, public agencies, and civic organizations should not be exempt from the same standard.
Yet across public life, we too often measure our public agencies, civic organizations, and nonprofit groups by their intentions instead of their outcomes. We count dollars spent, programs launched, people served, and press releases issued while failing to ask the harder question: Are America’s working families actually becoming more stable, self-reliant, and hopeful?
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That question should be at the center of the U.S.’s 250th anniversary. If the American dream means anything, it means that work, responsibility, and contribution should give people a fair shot at building a stable life.
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But for too many working people, that promise is breaking down.
Millions are doing what we ask of them — working full time, raising children, paying bills, trying to save — and still cannot get ahead. Roughly 44% of full-time workers earn less than they need to cover basic living costs. More than half of renters pay over 30% of their income on housing. Many families have little or no emergency savings.
A country in which work does not reliably lead to stability struggles to maintain trust — in institutions, in markets, in leadership, and in the future. When working people can’t get ahead, it affects their life choices: whether to have children, take a new job, start a business. When people work hard and still feel trapped, resentment grows, communities weaken, and the American dream slips away.
The answer isn’t more spending. Over many decades, the government has spent vast sums on safety-net programs. Philanthropy has invested billions in efforts to reduce poverty and renew communities. Businesses have launched social responsibility initiatives. Some of this work has helped. But the broader results are hard to defend if working families still cannot afford the basics at scale.
The answer to recapturing the American dream is an Outcomes Movement: We must publicly measure what matters to working people and then hold institutions accountable for results.
The measures we focus on are critical. If we measure national success solely by our current indicators, we will continue to have an incomplete picture — and working Americans will continue to struggle. Gross domestic product can rise while families fall behind. The stock market can soar while rent consumes a paycheck. The unemployment rate can look healthy while millions of jobs fail to pay enough to support a household.
An Outcomes Movement should begin with communities asking a basic question: What would it mean for working people here to thrive rather than merely survive? The answer will not be identical everywhere. A rural county, a postindustrial city, and a fast-growing suburb will face different pressures. That is why the work must be locally rooted, not dictated from Washington.
But certain fundamentals are common across public life. Can a family afford housing without being crushed by rent or a mortgage? Are children learning to read? Are people mentally healthy enough to participate fully in family, work, and community life?
Communities should set clear goals around outcomes such as wages, savings, housing costs, childcare costs, healthcare costs, education, and mental health. They should establish baselines. They should publish progress on public dashboards. And they should invite employers, schools, nonprofit organizations, churches and other faith institutions, civic groups, philanthropies, and local government to debate what efforts to try to improve those outcomes.
This is how successful businesses are run: leaders define success, track performance, and adjust when results fall short. Same in the military: objectives are clear, progress is measured, and failure has consequences.
If a community spends millions on workforce programs, residents should know whether more people are earning enough to afford the basics. If housing initiatives are launched, the public should know whether fewer families are housing-burdened. If schools adopt new reading strategies, parents should know whether more children will then read proficiently.
A focus on outcomes can expose systems that measure inputs instead of results. It can show where programs are failing. It can elevate local experimentation over national mandates. It can help communities distinguish between what sounds compassionate and what actually helps families become stable and self-sufficient.
This is already happening in places such as Utah. Despite a strong economy, state leaders recognized that Utah lacked a clear way to measure whether more working families were actually becoming stable. Through a multiyear effort, that concern became concrete policy: in 2026, the state legislature created the REACH initiative — Raising Expectations through Accountability, Community, and Hope — to establish Utah’s first outcomes-based economic framework and align public effort around moving working families toward stability.
Utah’s example reflects a principle that should guide more of our public life: define the goal, measure progress, and hold institutions accountable for results.
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Restoring trust requires more than rhetoric. It requires visible progress in the daily lives of working people. It requires judging success not by how much we spend or promise, but by whether more families can live with stability, dignity, and hope.
America needs an Outcomes Movement — local, practical, transparent, and relentless about results, not just intentions. If the American dream is to remain a living promise, we must measure whether it is still working for the people who work.
Andrew Wolk is the founder of Finding Common Purpose and the author of the pamphlet Common Purpose.
