United Way is proud to partner with Measure of America in launching the Common Good Foreacaster, a human development tool that illustrates how educational outcomes are linked to social and economic indicators.

Some of the features of the Common Good Forecaster include:

• enabled location services to help you find health, education and financial stability data in your local community quickly and easily;
• an interactive geographic interface;
• user friendly tools to see how small changes in educational attainment can change social and economic indicators and;
• mobile design to view the Common Good Forecaster on any device from desktops to smartphones and other mobile devices

The Common Good Forecaster is also an excellent complement to A Portrait of California 2014-2015, California’s latest human development report which measures health, education, and income well-being throughout California and Struggling to Get By: The Real Cost Measure in California 2015, our financial stability report for California. 

Feel free to explore the Common Good Forecaster below by seeing how improvements in educational attainment can improve indicators such as life expectancy at birth, crime rates, unemployment in your local community. If helpful, we are glad to share a few tips:

• To start, use either the interactive map or the scroll bar underneath to find your local state and county;
• Once you find your county, you will find human development data such as life expectancy at birth, data on low birthweights, obesity rates and more. Click on "Change Scenario" in the upper right-hand corner and select "All educational levels up 1 category" or "Everyone graduates HS." Notice how selecting either of those options can change social and economic indicators in your community.
• To reset the Common Good Forecaster, press "Change Geography."
• If you would like to see the data sources, the methodology and an FAQ section associated with the Common Good Forecaster, press the "info" button on the upper-right hand corner. 

For a more robust tutorial, feel free to explore a helpful video by Measure of America. 

The Common Good Forecaster can also be used on mobile devices by texting FORECASTER to 50503.

Click here to read our blog post on the Common Good Forecaster.