Calculating Progress Toward Our North Star Goal 

What is JFF’s North Star goal?
JFF is building a future that works—for everyone. Our North Star: By 2033, 75 million Americans facing barriers to economic advancement will have quality jobs.  

This is a bold, field-wide goal—one that JFF cannot reach alone. It will require coordination, collaboration, and innovation across sectors and systems. But we’re not just calling on others to act—we’re doing our part. JFF is committed to aligning our strategies, partnerships, and initiatives to drive measurable progress toward this goal. Our role is to help shape the path forward, spark innovation, mobilize action, and build the momentum needed to make the North Star a reality. 

How will we get there?
Achieving our shared North Star means moving beyond measuring activity; we must measure what truly matters—impact. That’s where JFF’s four Impact Drivers come in. These are the strategic levers we prioritize in our work, and they serve as leading indicators of progress toward our goal. We will not only measure these drivers—we will lead through them. 

1. Create: Drive the creation of more quality jobs. This driver expands the availability of quality jobs by working with employers, industries, and policymakers to improve job design, workplace practices, and workforce policies. This includes supporting business growth, advising on employer training programs, and advocating for innovations that enhance job quality. 
2. Prepare: Ensure people are prepared for quality jobs. This driver prioritizes equipping people with the skills, credentials, and experiences needed to succeed in quality jobs, including accessible training, apprenticeships, work-based learning, upskilling, and credentialing pathways aligned with industry needs.  
3. Obtain: Ensure people can obtain quality jobs. This driver focuses on connecting people to quality jobs by improving access to career navigation, placement, and hiring pipelines. This includes reducing barriers to employment, expanding support services, and fostering employer partnerships. 
4. Mobilize: Mobilize America to our vision and catalyze action. This driver involves engaging people, businesses, governments, and communities to advocate for and contribute to advancing access to quality jobs. This includes awareness-building, convenings, research, strategic communications and marketing, policy development, and cross-sector collaboration to drive systemic change. 

Our North Star and Impact Drivers form the foundation of JFF’s Impact Framework—a clear, actionable approach to driving measurable progress toward a future where quality jobs are within reach for all. 

What is a quality job?
Quality jobs are key to economic success for people, businesses, communities, and our nation’s economy. At JFF, we define a quality job as one that provides security and opportunity—financial well-being, stability, and growth. Together with leading economists and job quality experts, we’ve identified five core dimensions that capture what workers say they need to thrive at work and in life—grounded in decades of research and field practice.  

Quality jobs provide: 

1. Financial Well-Being: Fair pay, stable employment, and benefits that meet basic needs and reduce financial distress. 
2. Workplace Culture & Safety: A respectful, safe environment free from discrimination or harassment. 
3. Growth & Development Opportunities: Clear paths to build skills, gain experience, and advance in your career. 
4. Agency & Voice: The ability to influence working conditions and shape decisions that affect your job. 
5. Work Structure & Autonomy: Predictable, sustainable schedules and control over how your work gets done. 

What populations are included in the North Star Goal?
We know different populations experience our education and workforce systems differently. This is why we focus on understanding the barriers and opportunities for all Americans, including: 

1. People without a four-year degree 
2. Women, even those with a four-year degree 
3. People of color, even those with a four-year degree  
4. People with records of arrest, conviction, or incarceration  

These populations are overrepresented in frontline, low-wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement or adequate support to navigate to higher-quality employment. Increasingly, it is these jobs that face the highest risk of replacement through AI and automation, leaving these populations at even greater economic risk. Addressing the barriers faced by this key segment of the U.S. workforce presents a major opportunity to expand access to quality jobs, strengthen the labor market, and enhance U.S. economic competitiveness.     

How did we calculate the North Star goal?
The foundation of our 75 million North Star goal is rooted in a 2019 Gallup survey titled, Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States. The survey created a comprehensive job quality index by surveying 9,600+ U.S. workers, and was the most recent data available when we developed our North Star goal. The survey identified whether respondents work in quality jobs, based on traditional factors (income, benefits) and subjective elements (autonomy, security). 

Using Gallup’s data, we identified that 23% of workers were in JFF’s target populations and had quality jobs. We applied this percentage to the U.S. labor force in 2022 (164 million), establishing our baseline of 38 million people facing barriers to economic advancement in quality jobs. In 2023, we used this baseline to set our ambitious 10-year goal of roughly doubling the number, setting our North Star goal at 75 million.  

How do we measure annual progress?
To estimate progress toward our North Star goal, JFF has been partnering with the Families & Workers Fund, Gallup, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research to conduct an economy-wide, nationally representative survey to measure the state of job quality across the American workforce.  

For the 2025 update, we surveyed 18,400+ U.S. workers in January 2025. This sample was weighted to be representative of the national U.S. workforce. Of those respondents, roughly 86% were members of our North Star populations. We then multiplied the percentage of North Star respondents who were in quality jobs by the number of people in JFF’s target populations within the employed civilian labor force at the time of the survey (approximately 138 million) to generate a national estimate. This approach allowed us to estimate how many people in JFF target populations are currently in quality jobs, using consistent, research-backed methods.  

It’s important to note that population categories in our estimates are not mutually exclusive. For example, a woman with a record who does not have a bachelor’s degree could be included in several categories. As such, individual subgroup population counts do not sum to the overall total of people in quality jobs. 

Our methodology reflects our commitment to transparency, rigor, and ongoing learning as we track progress toward a future that works—for everyone. 

What has changed since the 2019 baseline?
Our estimates of progress toward our North Star goal have evolved over time, thanks to stronger data, sharper methods, and a more precise focus on the populations we aim to impact. 

Our estimates using the 2019 survey data were based on all survey respondents, regardless of whether they were employed or part of our target populations. In 2025, we refined our approach by focusing exclusively on employed workers within the North Star populations. This change makes our 2025 estimates more targeted and methodologically sound. 

We also refined our survey design to emphasize objective, research-validated measures and reflect an updated, more comprehensive definition of job quality. This led to a strengthened Job Quality Index—a composite measure that captures workers’ experiences across five core dimensions—designed to better reflect the real-world quality of jobs in the U.S. labor market.  The result: a 2025 estimate that shows clear directional progress toward our goal. 

Another key change is how we define and measure the labor force. In 2023, we estimated roughly 130 million people in our North Star populations were in the labor force, including both employed individuals and those actively looking for work. In 2025, we focused only on those currently employed, estimating about 138 million employed individuals in our target populations. This increase likely reflects a combination of factors: 

• U.S. population growth 

• A more diverse workforce 

• More individuals from our target populations entering or re-entering the labor force 

• A relative decline in labor force participation among those outside our target groups 

• Improved methods for aligning survey data with official labor force statistics 

Together, these improvements help us more accurately assess how far we’ve come—and where we need to go next—to reach our North Star. 

 For more information, contact Jessica Soja, Director, Strategy & Impact, at jsoja@jff.org.