ATLANTA — Prominent Orlando based philanthropist and entrepreneur Dr. Marlon Fuller is working to close the racial wealth gap by working to reframe financial literacy as a critical life science.
Fuller operates globally, where he runs a real estate holding company and serves the community through his national nonprofit, CoolKids.org.
His local work in the Atlanta community includes co-producing the annual FinLit Fest at Clark Atlanta University alongside the Us Or Else foundation founded by Atlanta hip-hop icon T.I.
For Fuller, financial education is deeply personal.
Growing up in Long Beach, California, he said money was scarce and conversations about building wealth never happened. After moving with his family to Connecticut, he remembers winters without heat and an empty refrigerator.
By 15, Fuller was working overnight shifts cleaning supermarket floors before heading directly to class each morning.
“The hours were there, but nobody in my environment was explaining compound interest, or how to build credit,” Fuller said. “We were working hard and staying in the same place because we were operating on income, not on knowledge. The wealth gap in this country is not just about what people earn. It’s about what they know.”
He credits family support and discipline for changing the course of his life.
“My mother, Peggy Fleming, is one of the strongest people I know,” he said. “She worked full time and kept us together, but we couldn’t stay where we were. She moved us to Hamden, Connecticut, to live with my father’s sister, Aunt Kever Jackson, and her husband Clarence “Bud” Jackson. Uncle Bud owned a supermarket floor cleaning business and became the father figure I needed. He put me to work at fifteen on the third shift, midnight to 7 AM, seven days a week. I’d get off and walk into school at 8 in the morning. It was exhausting, but I pushed through and did well in math and science, and that discipline eventually carried me to UConn where I earned my doctorate.”
That experience eventually led Fuller to earn a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Connecticut and shaped how he now teaches economics to young people.
Instead of traditional textbook language, he frames financial literacy as a set of everyday decisions.
“Life is an equation,” Fuller said. “You can add and multiply by putting yourself around the right people and making intentional choices, or you can subtract and divide.”
Fuller and his wife, Christina, later launched CoolKids.org as a free platform designed to remove barriers to financial education.
The nonprofit offers a 24 part curriculum for children ages 7 to 13 and nine masterclasses for adults, reaching more than 40,000 people nationwide through lessons on budgeting, entrepreneurship and asset building.
To expand access, Fuller also launched JAR, a youth streaming app available on Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV featuring more than 600 educational videos in English and Spanish.
Those lessons come to life each year at FinLit Fest at Clark Atlanta University, where students leave with stock vouchers intended to encourage ownership and investing.
The initiative has distributed more than $200,000 in stock vouchers globally.
“When a young person sees someone from their own world talking seriously about investing and ownership, it reaches them in a way no textbook ever will,” Fuller said. “Your situation is not your destination. Your determination is what changes the outcome,” he said. “I say that and then I stand there as the evidence of it, because I lived it.”
But Fuller said financial education alone is not enough.
After losing two older brothers to suicide, he expanded his work into youth emotional well being and recently supported a mental health initiative with The Reset Group at Topgolf Atlanta.
“A young person who is struggling emotionally cannot absorb financial education no matter how good the program is,” Fuller said. “These two areas of need are part of the same conversation, and treating them separately doesn’t serve the people we’re trying to reach.”
That philosophy also extends into his work with Project Pinnacle , a DeKalb County diversion program for first time, nonviolent felony offenders.
Through the partnership, program graduates receive stock vouchers and custom watches meant to symbolize a new beginning.
“It’s not just a diversion program, it’s a bridge from a dead end to a new beginning which is creating multigenerational impact,” Fuller said. “By choosing restoration over incarceration, she and her team are saving lives and preserving families.”
That mission extends beyond education and into entrepreneurship.
“Christina and I also started a wood watch line for men and women called LOBECA,” Fuller said. “The name is short for Long Beach, California, where I grew up, and the slogan captures what we try to live by: LO.ve what you do, BE.lieve in your potential, and CA.re for others. What makes it meaningful beyond the product is that 100 percent of the proceeds go directly to CoolKids.org to purchase stock for kids in our programs. So every watch someone buys puts ownership into the hands of a young person who might not have had access to it otherwise.”
Fuller is continuing to inspire students to carry the lessons forward using one principle: Each One Teach Ten.
“Work is what you get paid for,” Fuller concluded. “Purpose is what you were made for. More than any specific lesson, I want every young person to understand that they came into this world with a purpose already inside them. Not something to create, something to find. I push them to ask themselves: What am I good at? What do I care about? How can those two things serve somebody else? When the answers line up, that’s their assignment. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing.”