A Real Plan for Human Flourishing. Hint: It's Not Just Comfort.

“We just need to make people comfortable.”

That was a response from a Georgia county welfare official when asked how we can help people experiencing poverty. 

But for Rachel Barkley, that answer illustrates a fundamental problem. Speaking at a session on human flourishing at the State Policy Network’s annual meeting this week, she noted that too often assistance systems are designed to make hardship more manageable rather than help people achieve the stability, independence, and opportunity they need to truly thrive and flourish. 

"We're all here today because we don't think that that is a worthy goal, just comfortable," said Barkley, executive director of the Alliance for Opportunity, a 13-member multistate coalition working to strengthen employment, family stability, dignity, and affordability.

Barkley noted that 39 states are holding gubernatorial races this year and 21 will seat a new governor. During the session, the Alliance introduced a Governor’s Roadmap of executive actions designed for the opening days of a new administration.

“What a governor does in the first hundred days sets the tone for the rest of their administration,” she said.

The panel discussion, A Principled Vision for Human Flourishing: From Ideas to Action, brought together four leaders working to turn the ambitious idea of human flourishing into practical solutions.

Moderated by Akash Chougule of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, the conversation featured Gonzalo Schwarz of the Archbridge Institute, Kristi Putnam of the Human Flourishing Academy, Eric Cochling of the Georgia Center for Opportunity, and Restore Hope Executive Director Paul Chapman.

The Pillars of Flourishing

True flourishing, Gonzalo Schwarz argued, requires more than a strong economy. The president and CEO of the Archbridge Institute described it as the intersection of economic opportunity, psychological well-being, and a culture that gives people the confidence and support to move forward. Removing barriers such as burdensome occupational licensing requirements and soaring housing costs is essential, he said. But he added that policy alone cannot create the conditions people need to thrive.

"If people are not flourishing psychologically, if they don't have a lot of hope in their own lives, they don't have a lot of hope in the community, they don't think they have agency to act on their life, they're not going to act to improve the situation," Schwarz said.

The Archbridge Institute's Social Mobility in the 50 States report looks beyond income to ask a bigger question: Where do people have the best chance to build a better life?

Drawing on dozens of indicators, including housing and energy costs, business growth, education, family stability, and community connections, the index measures how well each state removes barriers and creates pathways to opportunity.

The results challenge some familiar assumptions. Utah ranks first, followed by Vermont, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, while economic powerhouse New York falls to 47th. Louisiana ranks last.

Schwarz said the findings show that a state’s wealth or reputation does not necessarily translate into upward mobility. He said what matters is whether people can afford to live there, develop their skills, find meaningful work, and draw support from strong families and communities.

Kristi Putnam, dean of the Human Flourishing Academy and a former state human services leader in Kentucky and Arkansas, described how fragmented systems affect families in their daily lives.

“Our children and families don’t come to us in pieces, and yet we plan and budget for them as if they do,” Putnam said.

She encouraged leaders to make large problems more manageable by examining them at the community level.

“It’s really daunting to look at a state and see whole state numbers,” Putnam said. “But when you break it down and you go, 'I live in Henderson County, Kentucky. There are 40 kids in foster care and half of them are out of my county. What can I do about that?,' it becomes solvable.”

Coordinating Help Around the Whole Person

Crisis rarely arrives one problem at a time.

Paul Chapman, executive director of Restore Hope, has spent years working alongside people whose lives are unraveling on several fronts at once. He has seen why a referral, even the right referral, often isn’t enough. Neither is handing someone a comprehensive directory of resources and expecting them to navigate their own way out, he noted.

“Our focus is individuals who are in real crisis. They need multiple helps at the same time. A single help isn’t going to significantly change their outcomes,” Chapman said.

A family may be fighting to keep its children out of foster care while also confronting eviction, unemployment, and unresolved legal obligations. Each problem intensifies the others. Yet the agencies and organizations equipped to help often operate in separate lanes, without timely information about what everyone else is doing.

Chapman believes the consequences of that disconnect can be enormous. Many life-altering decisions are made locally: whether a child enters foster care, whether someone’s parole is revoked, or whether criminal charges are filed. Those decisions may be made without a complete picture of the person’s circumstances or any progress already underway.

“Without that real-time feedback, it’s very difficult for someone to make those types of decisions,” Chapman said.

Chapman compares the challenge to building a house. You can assemble the finest plumbers, electricians, framers, and roofers in the community, but if no one is coordinating their work, they may arrive in the wrong order, build pieces that do not fit together, or have unnecessary overlap.

He has pointed out that families in crisis do not simply need more contractors. They need a coordinated plan for building something stable.

Restore Hope’s model brings service providers in a community together in an alliance and uses shared technology to coordinate individualized plans. Chapman said an average of 10 providers may be involved with one participant at the same time. Giving those partners appropriate, real-time visibility into services and outcomes can reduce duplication of efforts and help them understand whether their collective work is making a difference.

“The larger part of this is just the fragmented way that we all operate,” Chapman said. “It’s not wrong. We’re just executing the rule book. But that’s not the way that people come to us.”

The Role of Government and Community

When asked where government should step back and community should take a larger role, Chapman pointed to child welfare and corrections, two of the most consequential and expensive interventions a state makes.

The legal authority to remove a child from a home or incarcerate an adult must remain with government, Chapman said, because those decisions require due process and public accountability. But he added that helping a person or family rebuild after state intervention is something that requires relationships and support that government programs alone are not designed to provide.

State systems are often effective at monitoring compliance, he said, but changing the trajectory of a life requires more than completing a checklist.

Eric Cochling, chief program officer and general counsel at the Georgia Center for Opportunity, illustrated the problem with a story from a partner food ministry.

An 80-year-old volunteer who had worked the front desk for 15 years proudly told the ministry’s director that she had watched one family’s children grow up coming through the food line.

She meant it as a testament to years of service, but Cochling heard something different. After all those years of help, the family still needed that food line.

“That is not at all how this should be,” he said.

The problem, Cochling argued, is not a lack of assistance. It is that assistance is often organized around individual needs rather than a path toward independence. Food assistance addresses hunger. Utility assistance keeps the lights on. Housing assistance helps keep a roof overhead. Each may be essential in a moment of crisis, but the funding and systems behind them often operate separately.

“At no point do those things come together to ask what are we doing to help these people be independent of us?” Cochling said. “Where is the touch point for work?”

Measuring Progress, Not Activity

An audience question about bureaucratic incentives prompted a discussion about how government and nonprofit organizations define success.

“What you measure is what you incentivize,” Cochling said.

His organization uses questions from the Harvard Global Flourishing Study and tracks three early indicators while waiting for long-term results: changes in knowledge or skills, changes in attitudes, and self-reported changes in behavior.

Chapman said systems too often mistake activity for impact.

“The problem with bureaucracies is you equate busyness with effectiveness,” he said. “You can have lots of people doing all kinds of things, but so what?”

He pointed to law enforcement partners who are shifting their attention from the number of arrests made to the absence of crime.

Cochling said his employment programs measure whether participants remain employed six months and one year after receiving support, an especially important benchmark for people returning from incarceration. His family initiative, which operates in Title I schools and has expanded to five additional counties, tracks student grade-point averages, parents’ engagement with schools, and positive social behavior.

Putnam also challenged the assumption that every problem requires a new funding stream.

“One of the things we have to stop doing in government is we have to stop looking at partners as vendors,” she said. “There’s enough money in the system. There’s too much system in the money.”

Finding Language That Resonates

The session ended with a question that cut through the policy talk: Does anyone outside rooms like this actually say “human flourishing”? Does that phrase sound too academic?

Chougule conceded the point. “Human flourishing” may work in policy circles, he said, but it won’t necessarily resonate everywhere. Then he distilled the conversation into something simpler: The circumstances of a person’s birth should not determine the circumstances of that person’s life.

Schwarz pointed to findings from Archbridge Institute’s 2026 American Dream Snapshot, a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 Americans conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago.

The results suggest Americans’ understanding of a good life extends far beyond wealth. Eighty percent said freedom of choice in how to live is essential to the American Dream, while 76 percent pointed to a good family life.

Only 17 percent selected becoming wealthy. Sixty-four percent defined equality as equality of opportunity, and respondents placed integrity, honesty, personal responsibility, work ethic, and self-discipline among the most important virtues.

There's Room for Everyone

Chapman said a community alliance can make room for different organizations and different approaches while holding everyone accountable for results.

“Anyone in a community who offers a service is welcome to be a part of the alliance,” he said. “It’s not just a secular government effort with vendors. It’s a community effort and all community members are welcome to engage.”

Shared measurement then allows communities to see which efforts are helping people move forward.

“You’ve got a scoreboard, and you’re able to see who’s putting points on the board,” Chapman said. “The faith-based groups are doing it their way, because the person chooses. It’s customer choice, the freedom to choose or to choose otherwise, and then that data is going to show who’s good at solving the problem.”