Education, income and health are the building blocks for a good life.

Education is essential to getting and keeping a job with a livable wage and health benefits. An income adequate to pay for today’s necessities and save for the future provides families some sense of financial stability. Access to quality health care keeps children on track in school and adults productive at work. Remove any one of these building blocks and the other two topple.

Working with many partners, United Way continually looks for the most effective ways to help people gain access to educational, economic and health-related opportunities. To achieve further progress, it is now necessary to measure where we stand in these areas and look ahead to where we need to be as a country. For this reason, United Way launched an effort in 2005 to identify and track troubling social issues that are common across communities. The 12 indicators presented here show how America has fared in improving education, income and health status. They are based on the most reliable and relevant data available.

Taken together, these indicators show isolated signs of progress, but, overall, underscore the enormity of the task ahead. The three 10-year goals pull together the individual indicators, so that the sum is indeed
greater than the parts:

• Cutting the number of students who drop out by half requires improved readiness for kindergarten and closer attention to students as they move through the school system.
• Cutting the number of financially unstable working families by half requires strategies to help people increase income, save, and grow long-term assets.
• Increasing by one-third the percentage of healthy youth and adults requires that more Americans have access to health coverage and to good primary care from (and even before) birth, as well as the resources to avoid or stop substance abuse and other risky behaviors.

The need to act is great. But America’s energy and creativity in finding long-lasting solutions are great as well. A few examples of how communities are advancing the common good are presented here. Their strategies have reduced the dropout rate, increased income and promoted health in cities and counties of all sizes. Now it’s time to take these strategies to scale.

The Common Good Index

The Common Good Index indicates how conditions in education, income and health have declined during recent years in America. The index is based on the 12 indicators used by United Way for understanding conditions in education, income and health. Using 1998 as a base year—and setting conditions that existed in 1998 at an index number of 100—the Common Good Index fell to 93.1 by 2006. This indicates that significant efforts must be made to lift the index back to its 1998 level and higher.