Steamboat For All is an incubator, place-based initiative under Finding Common Purpose. To read more from Finding Common Purpose follow on Substack
For decades, Andrew Wolk, the Founder and CEO of Finding Common Purpose, has noticed how Americans collectively are not measuring towards what it takes for working people to thrive. We measure the increased rates of employment, but not whether those jobs provide a living wage. Our hospitals prioritize checking boxes instead of checking whether one’s health is improving, or if they can afford care at all. We track the surging costs to rent or own a home, while the growth of average earnings consistently fails to keep pace, leaving American’s floundering.
Wolk is pushing for a different approach. Instead of counting just to count, he and FCP are supporting communities to define what thriving outcomes mean to them and measure towards those goals. To measure not just jobs, but jobs that pay enough to thrive. That shift requires new metrics grounded in what working people actually need.
Building Thriving Into Measurement
Two FCP grantees are building this in real time: the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet, which has already deployed a thriving wage measure, and the St. George Community Development Corporation, which is just beginning to grapple with how to define thriving for their community.
Clear metrics, with what constitutes thriving determined in advance, are an absolute requirement for strengthening measurement systems and employing an outcomes focus. To measure thriving, you first have to define it. The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet (PCC), a collective impact organization serving Poughkeepsie children, youth, and families, did exactly that, creating a new metric: the thriving wage.
Over the past year, with funding from Finding Common Purpose, PCC developed a thriving wage threshold, a measure that asks what it takes to thrive, not just survive, in Poughkeepsie. Rather than relying on employment rates, which don’t distinguish between full- and part-time work, or account for regional cost of living, PCC built a new measure grounded in what community members actually told them about thriving.
This new metric utilizes validated national metrics such as the ALICE survival budget. The methodology is designed to be replicated by communities across the country. Most importantly, the prior metric did not resonate with community members as a realistic measure of economic thriving and wellbeing. PCC is continuing to refine this metric and connect with its community to ensure it is indeed reflective of their experiences.
A thriving wage includes not just survival, not just rent, food, and basic needs, but a far more expansive measure that also includes the ability to save, participate in community, pursue education, and build toward a secure future. It shifts the goal from ‘scraping by’ to ‘genuinely thriving. It represents a more accurate depiction of economic wellbeing and supports long term opportunity and upward mobility.
Challenges and Triumphs of Measuring Outcomes in Rural Communities
Measuring outcomes is harder than it sounds. Organizations often lack clean data, historical tracking, or the infrastructure to collect new information. In rural communities, the challenges multiply. In St. George, Maine, their journey towards outcomes thinking is at an earlier stage. The St. George CDC serves five small villages where transportation, limited resources, and interconnected needs make thriving harder to define, and harder to measure. They’re beginning to ask: What would thriving actually look like here? FCP is supporting them as they grapple with that question, learning alongside them as they build measurement infrastructure from the ground up.
The shift towards measuring thriving outcomes can be tailored to suit the needs of any community and is especially important for rural communities struggling with interconnected struggles. Mapping the data to reflect these outcomes is crucial and it must be intentional.
As Mike Felton, a local leader and Director of the Grace Institute put it, “it’s not only about picking data that tells a clear story, it’s also about choosing data that is compelling and is intentional about what it is being measured.” That’s the shift Wolk is championing: measurement as intention.
Rural communities face a unique constraint: small, stable populations mean privacy is harder to protect. When you’re measuring outcomes in a town of 500, how do you track progress without exposing individual stories? St. George CDC is wrestling with this through their tracking of student outcomes. Each year, they only have about 10 new students coming in and out of their systems. This small population size means that collecting and sharing data becomes a complex and intricate task, but it also presents the CDC with a bright spot. Due to the small population size they are able form more trusting relationships with their community members, getting a wider picture of the unique struggles each child faces, allowing them to better pinpoint an intervention to help shape the outcomes they wish to see for their children. They’re showing it’s possible to measure with integrity, even at a small scale.
PCC and St. George CDC are showing what’s possible when communities define their own thriving. But this is just the beginning. As more organizations shift their measurement toward outcomes instead of bare survival, it reshapes what they fund, how they report success, and ultimately, who gets counted as thriving.
The question now is: How do we scale this shift? How do we make thriving the standard, not the exception?