The FiM Research was founded in 2010 by Matt Bloom, associate professor of organizational psychology at the Mendoza College of Business of the University of Notre Dame (IN). During the last ten years, our research team has pioneered groundbreaking research in wellbeing by mainly focusing on the caring professions (clergy, teachers, and healthcare professionals). The project has won multi-million grants from the Templeton Foundation and the Lilly Endowment. The research team currently includes an interdisciplinary group of professionals. Manuela Casti Yeagley leads the early-career clergywomen project. She has been involved in theological education for the last fifteen years. Her areas of expertise are practical theology, congregational studies, gender studies, and social science research methods. You can read more about the Wellbeing at Work/Flourishing in Ministry Research at https://workwellresearch.org.

Our website aims to build a supportive and caring environment. Given this objective, we expect our community members to adopt a respectful and civil attitude and abstain from personal attacks and offensive language. The FiM Research team will moderate the discussion. Whoever infringes on this ethos will be warned first and then blocked.

We strongly believe that research should not be a hierarchical enterprise and that the insights we gather from our conversations with clergy should be open to our participants' feedback. This website aims at providing updates about the FiM early-career clergy research; it also includes sections designed to involve our research participants in discussing their experiences as new clergy. The website's primary audience is FiM research participants. However, our community welcomes any reader--especially new pastors and priests--who may be interested in this subject area and wishes to contribute to this ongoing conversation.

Clergy often navigate complex issues concerning their internet footprint and willingness to speak about private or professional matters openly. We sympathize with these concerns. While this community primarily involves pastors and priests who share similar journeys, a website is also a public square. We trust our community members to make wise choices about the extent to which they want to share their identity details. If you would like to keep your identity private, please set your account to appear under an alias/nickname. You will always be free to change it or to disclose your real identity to members you want to contact at a more personal level.