With over 25 years of experience, Dr. Brian Higginbotham of Utah State University has witnessed the impact of family life education and how working with and through Cooperative Extension programs can facilitate real results.
Dr. Higginbotham started his career as a marriage and family therapy graduate student at Auburn University and was mentored by Dr. Francesca Adler-Baeder. He was heavily moved by the idea of being part of the fence at the cliff (prevention education) rather than at the bottom of the cliff where emergency services operate (intervention). He went on to earn his PhD in human development and family studies, where he learned a great deal about grant writing and Extension.
In 2005, Dr. Higginbotham began working for Utah State University as an Extension Specialist in Family Life. He has been the director of Healthy Relationships Utah for the past 20 years and has served as the Associate Vice President of Extension for 13 years. He is also a faculty co-advisor to the Utah Marriage Commission, which is hosted at Utah State University.
In his time with USU Extension, some of the trends Dr. Higginbotham has noticed include marriage and relationship education becoming more normalized and accepted as a tool for the general population. He has seen more funding opportunities at the state and federal levels as the field gains traction as a reliable resource for the community. Rather than relying only on what people see online or hear from family and friends, these programs are able to get reliable tools and ideas into the hands of real people at, most often, no cost.
A trend many are seeing in the field currently is the pace of technology advances. Dr. Higginbotham has seen greater availability of programming in remote places and on-demand options that meet people where they are. As a result, he believes family life education will need to continue to evolve alongside technological advances to meet demand and sustain interest.
Healthy Relationships Utah, having served over 100,000 individuals with overwhelmingly positive self-reporting data, and the Utah Marriage Commission have been at the forefront of these advances, especially since the pandemic. As communities were unable to meet in person for group classes, the use of online groups became an everyday duty for many family life educators working for HRU. With this evolution, UMC has developed a catalog of online, on-demand relationship courses including dating, marriage, cohabiting, divorce, and parenting, among others.
As a professor in a faculty role, there is a good measure of stability in the profession. Extension has built a great reputation and a healthy amount of respect in communities, which helps with many of the hurdles that come in this line of work. However, evolving funding landscapes and the ebb and flow of what different governing bodies prioritize can pose a wide range of challenges. One such challenge is finding and keeping great employees, as short-term employment opportunities determined by grant funding periods create an uphill battle of retaining educators. As uncertainty around soft funding continues, Dr. Higginbotham recognizes the difficulty of offering only short-term employment promises. He hopes to see stable resources and more institutionalized family life education programming in the future.
As much as classroom and academic journals are foundational to the education of many, Dr. Higginbotham advises professors to work with the Extension program in their state. Working with Extension can get that research into the hands of many more people and communities. He encourages professors to reach out to the Extension faculty in their state to find new opportunities for furthering this work.
For other professionals entering family life education programming, Dr. Higginbotham encourages supplementing business and entrepreneurship studies and skills to adapt family life education across more types of agencies, rather than relying solely on public funds as a public service.
Being part of the prevention fence can lead to wonderful opportunities and real outcomes through Cooperative Extension. Whether you are in academia, advising couples or families, or part of the family life educator sector, there are opportunities to be found through effective resources and results in Extension.
