What If We Could ...?

Explore the Impact of Educational Achievement on a Community

The Common Good Forecaster™ explores the consequences of education in a specific community of your choice. This online tool was created by United Way and the American Human Development Project to forecast how things might change in your community if educational outcomes were changed.

You begin by selecting a state, and optionally, a county. You'll see a page of demographic data for that locale. There are tabs to display Health, Financial Stability, Education, and Community Involvement statistics. On the left are sliders you can use to modify the data on highest education level achieved.


For instance, in the county where I live 10% of the population is currently below the federal poverty level. If I use the slider to increase the percent of residents completing high school by 7%, from 47% to 54%, the percent of the population living below the poverty threshold would be expected to fall to 8.7%. The voting rate would increase from 54.7% to 55.6%.

This tool could be used to dramatically demonstrate how improved local educational achievement can benefit the general well-being of the community.

Additional Information

United Way is a national network of nearly 1,300 local organizations that work to advance the common good by focusing on education, income and health. These are the building blocks for a good life: a quality education that leads to a stable job, enough income to support a family through retirement, and good health. They have a goal to cut the high school dropout rate in half by 2018.

The American Human Development Project is a nonpartisan, non-profit initiative established to introduce to the United States a well-honed international approach and tool for measuring human well-being: the human development approach and the human development index. The project’s mission is to stimulate fact-based public debate about and political attention to human development issues in the United States and to empower people with an instrument to hold elected officials accountable for progress on issues we all care about: health, education and income.