Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America

By: Lisbeth B. Schorr
Publisher: Anchor (1998)  
ISBN-10: 0385475330

Common Purpose is about successful efforts to turn around high rates of school failure, child abuse, youth violence, teen parenting and persistent poverty. 

The good news is that it can be done. The bad news is that if it's to be done on a scale large enough to matter, it requires fundamental change. Past policies and practices that govern how our efforts to help are funded, held accountable, and regulated, undermine the essentials of what works. 

Common Purpose tells the stories of the community builders who are combining what works to transform whole neighborhoods, the early childhood people who help families assure their children's readiness to learn, the principals and teachers who have built learning communities in which all children learn at high levels, the child protection professionals who are partnering with neighborhood churches, and the community-based organizations that have converted schools and housing projects from hostile fortresses into valued community centers. The accounts of these successes suggest an agenda for action, because in prevailing systems environments, the best people working in the best programs have to swim upstream and buck or bend or break the rules in order to succeed. But we are now learning to change these environments and thereby to improve results for children, families, and neighborhoods at a scale large enough to matter. Today, the wizards that began by beating the odds are showing how to change the odds so that even non-wizards can succeed. 

Their successes demonstrate that America has the capacity to achieve our common purposes and to assure that all our children will come into adulthood prepared for productive work, engaged citizenship, and responsible parenting.

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