Why 100% isn’t just a destination, it’s a different way of thinking.
Listen to this story instead.
What happens when a community decides every student should graduate? Or that every family should have what it needs to thrive? David Bird remembers the first time he heard someone suggest aiming for 100%.
It came up during a Promise Partnership Council meeting, where youth leaders and representatives from schools, cities, nonprofits, and state agencies were discussing their shared work. When the conversation turned to the idea of 100% goals, David found himself wrestling with it.
His first reaction was simple. “My immediate thought was similar to what a lot of people were saying: That’s a great goal to try to achieve, but is that irresponsible, or even maybe unattainable?”
As manager of the Ruth Vine Tyler Library in Midvale, Utah, David spends his days helping kids learn to read. His work is built around setting ambitious goals, measuring progress, and continually adapting as new challenges emerge. Like most leaders, he is used to goals that stretch people without asking them to promise the impossible.
A goal of 100% seemed to break that rule.
David’s reaction isn’t unusual. A goal of 100% can sound unrealistic because it appears to violate one of the most fundamental assumptions of goal setting: goals should be ambitious, but attainable.
“If you’re doing a SMART goal, the ‘R’ is for ‘realistic,'” David said. “If your graduation rate—or whatever outcome you’re measuring—is at 80%, then 85% is a reasonable goal.”
But the longer David sat with the idea, the more he began thinking about what it would require. “Let’s just look at one school, for example. If we’re going to get 100% of third graders at that school reading on grade level,” he said, “logistically, what would that take?”
Instead of debating whether the goal was realistic, David began imagining reading specialists, dedicated instructional time, shared standards, stronger coordination between schools and community partners, and a statewide commitment to working together.
His question had shifted from whether 100% was too ambitious to what a community organized around that goal would actually look like. What if that shift in perspective is actually the point?
Expanding the goal can shrink the problem
At first glance, a 100% goal can feel impossibly large. But when communities begin pressing into that number instead of pulling away from it, the percentage starts to dissolve, revealing the people, relationships, and opportunities for action hidden inside it. The question shifts from “How do we improve this metric?” to “Who isn’t there yet, and what stands in their way?”
That’s where Amy Ahrens Terpstra, Promise Partnership Utah’s (PPU) managing director, has seen the conversation change.
“When you really get down to the numbers,” she said, “it makes it feel much more manageable. A 100% graduation goal that once sounded overwhelming, for example, might add only 65 seniors who need another pathway to finishing. A 100% early literacy goal might become 45 children at a single elementary school who need extra support.”
Nicole Davis, PPU’s senior director of data strategy, has watched that shift play out in community after community. Last year, her team helped local partnerships translate broad population goals into the number of children in a particular school or neighborhood who would need to reach the next milestone. That exercise, based on a StriveTogether initiative called “Know Your Number,” became a way to make ambitious goals tangible.
What surprised her wasn’t the calculation itself, but what the calculation allowed people to see.
“Those numbers put faces behind the data,” she continued. “People were often surprised to learn how few students were represented, which made it easier to imagine supporting every one of them. It was really energizing. Those early conversations generated a lot of momentum.”
Why 100% in the first place?
By this point, it might seem like the important numbers are the smaller ones: 65 seniors, 45 readers, or the handful of families who still need support. Those numbers help communities organize their work,but the 100% goal reminds them who that work is ultimately for.
Put differently: Most goals define success. A 100% goal defines responsibility.
“When you’re driving down the highway and you see signs that say ‘Zero Fatalities,’ you know there are still going to be traffic deaths this year,” Amy explained. “But why would anyone ever say, ‘We’re okay with ten?'”
But some aspirations only make sense when they’re universal.
“No child or family should ever have to look at a community’s stated goal and wonder whether they’re part of the percentage that’s been left behind,” Amy said. “100% is the only acceptable goal.”
David’s own journey mirrored the shift Amy and Nicole described. Almost without realizing it, the library manager had moved from asking whether the goal was possible to asking what it would take to make it possible.
“If it’s 100%,” David said, “we need every single person involved in this. We need them to be able to report back the challenges they’re hitting so that we can problem solve together to fix them. To be realistic, you’d have to have all of these entities involved and pointed in the same direction.”
Looking back, David no longer sees a 100% goal as something any one organization is expected to achieve. He sees it as an invitation for an entire community to move in the same direction.
Written by Danielle LeCourt, Partnership Communications and Narrative Director
