Kristina Brown has demonstrated a commitment to strengthening families in the Ozarks and she’s helped train close to 500 people across 13 counties in southwest Missouri to do the same.
Brown is the director of the Marriage and Family Therapy program at The School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute, and is a licensed marital and family therapist at Midwest Assessment and Psychotherapy Solutions. Educational experiences on both the East and West coasts through master’s and doctoral work at the University of San Diego and Syracuse University, respectively, led to an opportunity to become a teacher at Forest Institute in Springfield in 2007.
While serving as an assistant professor of the Marriage and Family Therapy program at Forest, she worked as the project manager during the last 18 months of a five-year, $1.2 million grant that supported the development of a curriculum to train child welfare professionals and others about the benefits to children through healthy marriages and families.
“I was able to exponentially multiply the number of participants to our trainings by modifying the delivery of the curriculum to better fit the working schedules and needs of our target population.” says Brown, who holds a doctorate of philosophy in marriage and family thearapy.
Her training and teaching efforts led her to be nominated in 2008 as supervisor of the year, honored at a faculty toast in 2009 and promoted to director of the MFT program in 2010. Under her leadership, the MFT program has expanded its community service to include Ronald McDonald House Charities and the Greene County Teen Court to provide a family-communication workshop.
Additionally, she says she is proud to serve as the founder and mentor for the Medical Family Therapy Student Group at Forest, which has developed two annual activities to support Ronald McDonald House and Project Linus, a group that makes blankets for critically ill children.
“The foundation of my supervision and training philosophy is that it is important to not only learn new knowledge and skills, but also to develop our professional attitude,” Brown says. “This past semester, my students coined a new MFT term – to get ‘Browned’ – which they defined as ‘to bring a sense of warmth and security while at the same time challenging us.’”
She also works as a licensed marital and family therapist at Midwest Assessment and Psychotherapy Solutions to supervise the training young professionals seeking licensure in marriage and family practice.
In addition, she has served others beyond her workday by being involved in her children’s parent teacher associations and booster clubs and by taking on leadership positions with associations assisting marriage and family therapy.
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