Meet Art Fuller

It started with a doctoral dissertation. Art Fuller was working on two advanced degrees — a Doctor of Health Sciences and a Master of Public Health — at a Midwestern university. His research question was simple to ask but hard to answer. Why do so few African American college students think about careers in behavioral health? This is true even when their own lives point straight toward that field.

He interviewed eleven students. They came from ten different universities in ten different states. Almost every one of them had lived through something real. It might be a family member's mental health struggle. It might be a season spent caring for others. It might be a hard personal challenge they overcame. Each experience lined up with real behavioral health work. But not one student had ever been told that their experience counted as a career qualification. Nobody had given them the words for it.

On November 12, 2024, Fuller founded Voice Up Publishing. It is an Indiana-based company built around one mission: connecting people to purpose. The idea grew straight out of his dissertation research. If people already have valuable life experience, Voice Up's job is to help them name it and describe it. Then it helps them turn that experience into something real — a career step, a piece of writing, a program, or a business.

Voice Up grew fast. It grew without paid advertising. Within its first year, it had reached thousands of cities in more than 130 countries. Almost all of that growth came from word of mouth and one-on-one conversations.

If two full-time leadership roles and a doctoral dissertation were not enough, Fuller also spent this same time releasing his own music. He records under the name J Ellington. His catalog has now passed one million streams. It reaches listeners in more than 134 countries. He has never spent money on advertising or promotion. His only cost is a basic streaming subscription of about sixteen dollars a month.

During this same stretch of time, Fuller wrote and released a full autobiography. The book is called Titan of Life, and it tells the story of a longtime community leader who is the President and CEO of a regional behavioral health organization. He has spent more than forty years at the organization, rising from a receptionist position all the way to the top. Fuller conducted the interviews, wrote the book, coordinated professional photography, and helped deliver the finished project to the leader and his family.

On top of everything above, Fuller works as a paid expert consultant for a leading global artificial intelligence company. His job is to bring real, lived professional knowledge into the training and testing of some of the most advanced AI systems being built today. In its own way, this is the clearest proof yet of his dissertation's central idea. His lived experience and professional knowledge, once properly named and described, became something a global company was willing to pay for directly.

At the same time he was building Voice Up, Fuller was working full-time as Chief of CCBHC Operations. His employer was a regional behavioral health organization in west-central Indiana. CCBHC stands for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic. It is a new federal model built to expand access to mental health and addiction care.

In 2024, the State of Indiana looked at twenty-seven applications from organizations across the state. Only eight were chosen to become official CCBHC demonstration pilot sites. His organization was one of them. Fuller led this effort for a large organization serving thousands of patients each year across multiple counties.

Fuller also took on a leadership role in a regional Rural Health Transformation Initiative. This is a statewide effort to strengthen health care access in rural communities. His region covers seven counties across west-central Indiana.

He did not hold just one role in this effort. He held three roles at the same time. He served as a member of the region's work groups. He served as the Lead Facilitator for the grant writing team. And he served as a member of the state's thirteen-member regional committee. The initiative involves significant multi-year investment aimed at changing how rural health care works across the region.

Most recently, Fuller was appointed Chief Executive of a brand-new behavioral health university. This is a new school built to be the first of its kind in its field. Most schools train students for one existing job. This one is built around three goals at once. First, it helps current behavioral health workers grow their skills. Second, it builds a pipeline that introduces students to behavioral health careers as early as elementary school. Third, it works to reduce the stigma around mental and behavioral health through a publishing effort that shares real community stories.

Fuller's own dissertation research sits at the center of the new school's approach. The whole institution is built on one idea: people already have what it takes. They just need it named, at the right time, in the right way.