Family First, Community Second, KPI Last is a groundbreaking civic and cultural framework that challenges how America understands family, work, community, and responsibility. Samuel L. Calvin-author, systems thinker, and founder of the House of Kofi-offers a deeply personal and structurally rigorous analysis of why families struggle to stay present, why communities weaken under economic pressure, and why fatherhood has become a casualty of modern policy and productivity culture.
Blending Black Gen-X lived experience, sociological research, and civic design, Calvin argues that parental absence and community erosion are not moral failures-they are policy outcomes. Across workplaces, schools, justice systems, and neighborhoods, the United States measures productivity, output, and economic growth, while ignoring the human metrics that sustain a healthy society: time, presence, attachment, stability, emotional safety, and intergenerational belonging.
In this book, Calvin introduces a suite of transformative frameworks, including the National Presence Policy, the Father Presence Index, the Community Density Score, the Coherence Pipeline, and the PMFC (Portable Moral Field Code)-tools designed to help leaders, educators, policymakers, and families rebuild the conditions where people can thrive. With clarity and depth, he reveals how extraction-based economics steals time from households, how policy drift harms men and boys, how communities lose elders and emotional anchors, and how modern institutions consistently reward absence over presence.
Family First, Community Second, KPI Last is both an indictment of the systems that shape American life and a blueprint for redesigning them. Calvin provides a path forward rooted in presence-centered masculinity, stronger community networks, human-centered metrics, and a civic logic that places families and neighborhoods at the center of national wellbeing. For fathers, mothers, community builders, and leaders searching for a way to restore connection and coherence in an increasingly fragmented world, this book offers a new architecture-and an invitation to build a future where stability is measurable, and presence is protected.
