Hope Street Tool Seeks to Help People See Potential

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Hope Street Group — a nonprofit organization whose goal is to create policies that enhance economic opportunity — is offering a new way to measure the road to prosperity. Hope Street, organized in 2003, has created an online Economic Opportunity Index that seeks to measure the extent to which Americans — by race and gender — have opportunities available to achieve the American dream, and seek to identify the factors most important to improving opportunity in the future. The online tool allows users to display opportunity by race and gender and to change the weight of categories to see how opportunity can change if there are changes in education or unemployment. Hope Street receives funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is dedicated to solving social and environmental problems, and the Omidyar Network, whose goal is to help create opportunities for people to improve their quality of life.