Flourishing Summit at Harvard Represents a Milestone for Baylor's Matthew Lee
On March 18–19, 2026, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University hosted the inaugural Flourishing Network Summit, marking the 7th year of the Flourishing Network founded by Dr. Matthew T. Lee, Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at Baylor. Lee remains Director of the Flourishing Network that he founded at Harvard's Human Flourishing Program in 2019. The Summit brought together researchers, organizational leaders, and practitioners with a shared commitment to understanding and advancing human flourishing. Many participants have been long-standing members of the Flourishing Network, including some inaugural members.
The event was guided by three principles that mirror the Institute for Global Human Flourishing's own research framework: that flourishing must be pursued at the ecosystem level, that love is essential to flourishing for individuals, organizations, and societies, and that character is foundational to human thriving.
Lee opened the summit alongside Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, co-director of the Global Flourishing Study, the landmark longitudinal study housed at Baylor's Institute for Global Human Flourishing in collaboration with Harvard and Gallup. The GFS—which has collected three waves of data from more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries—provided much of the empirical foundation for the summit's conversations.
Rather than deliver a traditional keynote, Lee chose to model the summit's relational ethos from the opening session. He invited Brian Wellinghoff of Barry-Wehmiller to join him for an interactive dialogue exploring the five elements of the Barry-Wehmiller Manifesto and the company's approach to people-centered leadership. Barry-Wehmiller's Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute served as the summit's lead sponsor. The dialogue's focus on relational depth in organizational life connects directly to the work of Baylor's C.A.R.E. Initiative (Calling, AI, and Relational Employment), which examines how relational dynamics and a sense of calling drive organizational excellence.
The summit's interest-group sessions brought together leaders working across domains that closely parallel the Institute's own initiatives — from leadership development and organizational culture to education and community flourishing. Among the highlights was a session on "Leadership for Flourishing" facilitated by Katy Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston, authors of Leader: Know, Love and Inspire Your People, who led participants through a process of "Loving Collective Inquiry" — a structured practice of responding to one another with empathy, curiosity, and care.
The Flourishing Network Summit represents exactly the kind of bridge between rigorous research and real-world practice that the Institute for Global Human Flourishing was created to build. As the GFS dataset continues to grow and the Institute's applied initiatives in churches, cities, workplaces, and on Baylor's own campus mature, gatherings like this one ensure that the research reaches the leaders and communities who can put it to work.
Learn more about the Flourishing Network Summit and the Global Flourishing Study.