About us
An institute with open doors
The ancient schools taught in the open: a teacher, a colonnade, and anyone who cared enough to show up. The MMF Behavioral Institute borrows that spirit for the families who need it most: parents raising children with autism, ADHD, and behavior that the parenting books never covered.
The problem we started with
The science of behavior is well established. Applied Behavior Analysis has decades of research behind its core tools: reinforcement, functional assessment, skill building. But that knowledge is hard for most parents to reach. Parent training is billed by the hour, referrals sit on waitlists for months, and the research itself is written for researchers.
Meanwhile the problems don't wait. The meltdown happens tonight, and the school calls tomorrow morning. Parents are the people on the floor with the child, yet they're the last ones the system gets around to teaching.
What we do about it
We take the parent-facing core of behavioral science and give it away: a free library of readable guides, a set of free structured courses, and (soon) video observation by a BCBA for the moments words can't describe. The library and the courses cost nothing and ask nothing. The observation asks for one thing instead of money: the research permission, so the footage joins the research corpus while a behavior analyst spends time on yours. It is a description of what they see in those minutes, never advice or a plan.
We are a for-profit company
The MMF Behavioral Institute is a for-profit corporation. Institute is our registered corporate name rather than a claim to charitable status, and we would rather say that here than let a word do work it hasn't earned. We take no donations, we hold no tax exemption, and nobody here is a volunteer.
Most of what we do is commercial. We build behavioral technology to sell, we license data to companies that pay for it, and that revenue is what the people here live on. We don't think any of that sits badly beside the mission. Behavioral science has a real gap where footage of ordinary children in ordinary homes should be, and closing it takes sustained money, not goodwill. Commercial funding is what pays for the collection, the review, the free library, and the courses. The science advances either way, and we would rather be the company that says where the money comes from than one that lets you assume.
How we pay for it
We don't run ads and we never charge parents. The Institute is funded by a pay-for-data program: families opt in to contribute everyday home videos and decide, one permission at a time, which uses they allow. We license what they have allowed to vetted organizations building better research, therapies, and tools for children like theirs.
Payment follows profit. A family earns $10 per 15 minutes of usable footage when they allow a company, or us, to profit from the footage, whether that means selling a product or running the research behind one. Research a company runs sits in the commercial permission for that reason, so no business gets commercial access at an unpaid rate.
Academic and nonprofit contributions are unpaid, and unpaid does not mean the licensee pays nothing. Universities and nonprofits pay us a licence fee, and their licence bars them from selling anything built on a child's footage. Their output is published research rather than a product, so there is no sale to share with the family. If one of them later wants to sell what it built, it needs the commercial permission, and then the family is paid.
Two things we say out loud that most companies would not. Video of a child's face cannot be made anonymous, so we code it and bind licensees by contract rather than claiming the footage is untraceable. And software already trained on a family's footage cannot be untrained, so the permissions that cover software are permanent for training already done. Both facts are in the consent, not the appendix.
Most companies would put that paragraph on page 30 of the terms of service. We put it on the homepage, because the model only works, ethically and practically, if parents understand it and choose it. The complete data lifecycle is on our Data Transparency page.
What "Institute" means to us
It means we hold ourselves to the standard of a school. You won't find infinite feeds, fear-based marketing, or miracle-outcome promises here. Guides are reviewed, dated, and revised. Where the evidence is settled we say so plainly, and where individual guidance is needed we say that too, and point you to a BCBA, pediatrician, or licensed clinician who knows your child.