About Dr. Misty D. Freeman
INTRODUCTION
I Didn't Study the Systems That Fail People.
I Grew Up Inside Them.
I'm Dr. Misty D. Freeman, founder of Mocha Sprout. Colleagues call me The Belonging Scientist™. Before I advised a single tech company or wrote a word about algorithms, I spent 25 years inside human systems from every seat available: social case worker, classroom teacher, school administrator, and now Director of Special Education.
From Lived Experience to Leadership
Sit in that many seats and you learn something no dataset can teach you. Systems rarely fail by accident. They fail by design, and the people they fail are usually the people nobody bothered to design for.
I know because I was one of them. I grew up in poverty in rural South Alabama, in schools that were never built with a girl like me in mind. What poverty couldn't take was my curiosity, and curiosity carried me further than anyone predicted: a BS in Rehabilitation Counseling, another one in Human Resource Management, an MS in Education, an MS in Applied Behavior Analysis, and a Doctorate in Instructional Technology, plus certifications in 3D modeling and women's entrepreneurship along the way. Somewhere on that road, the questions I'd been carrying since childhood finally got a scientific vocabulary.
In 2021 I founded Mocha Sprout to put that vocabulary to work. I'd sat through one too many meetings where "equity" was the goal and nobody could point to a number that proved anything. So I built a lab, a place where belonging gets measured and managed like anything else an organization takes seriously. The MOCHA Mixture™, the framework at the center of everything we do, came out of that decision.
My particular fire is for the people algorithms overlook first: children, Black girls and women, and neurodivergent individuals. In 2026, the day-job side of my work was recognized when Alabama named me its Special Education Director of the Year. I carry that award into every boardroom I enter, because the students behind it are exactly who ethical AI is for.
Whether I'm advising a product team, training a district, or standing on a keynote stage, I bring the same things everywhere: behavioral science, lived experience, and my refusal to let belonging stay performative.
