Every city has its young-professional charity groups — the happy-hour fundraisers that come and go. Mobile’s Fuse Project set out to be something different: an organization built by people in their twenties and thirties who wanted to attack the roots of childhood poverty, and who decided early on that if an idea wasn’t bold enough to make people say “wow,” it wasn’t worth doing.
More than a decade in, the Fuse Project has grown from a scrappy startup run on energy and social connections into a grantmaking machine that has raised more than $3 million for programs serving children and families across Mobile and Baldwin counties. Its story offers a case study in how a small group of volunteers, organized around a simple conviction, can build an institution.
“Your zip code should not be an indicator of life success”
The organization began when a small group of young professionals from both sides of Mobile Bay — different industries, different backgrounds, one shared goal — came together to level the playing field for kids growing up in low-income communities. Co-founder and board member Brie Zarzour distilled the founding philosophy into a single sentence that still guides the group: “Our goal with Fuse has always been to provide an opportunity. We strongly believe that your zip code should not be an indicator of life expectancy or life success.”
That conviction — that a child’s prospects should not be set by the neighborhood they are born into — pushed Fuse Project to sharpen its focus over the years. The organization began by supporting nonprofits across Mobile and Baldwin counties and gradually concentrated its grantmaking on programs with the greatest measurable impact in the low-income communities where it works.
Its official motto, “If it’s not WOW, it’s not worth doing!” sounds like a party slogan, but it has shaped the organization’s tactics. Fundraising events are designed as experiences people talk about afterward, not rubber-chicken banquets. And the group’s instinct to do things differently led to one of its most practical innovations: the Fuse Factory, a co-working space in downtown Mobile shared with other nonprofits as well as for-profit organizations — a deliberate effort to put mission-driven organizations in the same room so they can partner rather than duplicate each other’s work.
A dinner in an empty lot that sharpened the mission
Some of the most consequential moments in the Fuse Project’s history have doubled as parties. One Light the Fuse dinner was held in a vacant lot next to the Mobile Downtown Alliance building, where tables of five couples each were assigned a specific topic to discuss — how the organization could best address a given problem — and then reported their conclusions to the room. The hour-long exercise helped the board sharpen the mission focus that still defines the group’s grantmaking.
That event also drew in a future executive director. Ann-Brooks Morrissette, an accountant by training who had spent five years mentoring low-income college students at the University of Alabama, contacted the board shortly afterward looking for a bigger role. She saw the position as a natural fit: her accounting background paired with the relationship-building she had honed in after-school mentoring. Under her leadership the organization has continued to professionalize while keeping the founding esprit de corps intact.
The Order of Fuse and the “Cradle to College” pipeline
Fuse Project’s signature innovation is the Order of Fuse — a deliberate take on a traditional Mardi Gras mystic society, invented in the city that started Mardi Gras in America. But instead of a ball and a parade, the Order is capped at 100 members who gather monthly to network, socialize and volunteer, with a mission aimed squarely at breaking the cycle of poverty in low-income communities. Honorary members contribute funds used solely to pay for the Order’s annual grants.
The grantmaking follows what the organization calls a “Cradle to College” pipeline — a continuum of investments from early childhood through higher education. One early initiative launched a K-3 program focused on high-quality early learning in partnership with the Historic Avenue Foundation in Mobile, extending the organization’s reach into the city’s historic Avenue cultural district.
Partnership is a running theme. Fuse Project collaborates with the Cookery Project, which teaches cooking classes and gardening alongside food literacy education, and with Flourish, a Daphne nonprofit serving teen girls. The logic is pragmatic: rather than pile another program onto a crowded social-services landscape, Fuse Project tries to find the organizations already doing effective work and put resources behind them, avoiding what its founders call mission overlap.
Getting creative when the world shut down
When the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed in-person gatherings, the organization improvised. Instead of its signature gala, Fuse Project staged a “Light the Fuse Week” of mini-events in partnership with local businesses: a dinner hosted with the Fairhope Inn and The Scout Guide, a Fuse Project beer launched with Old Majestic Brewing Co., and a Mobile food tour run by Bienville Bites. The episode reinforced a trait that has defined the group since its founding — the willingness to try something new rather than cancel.
The founders, many of them now raising families of their own, acknowledge they are no longer the young crowd that started the organization. Recruiting the next generation of movers and shakers is a standing priority, and the group’s events — from its Lip Sync Battle, where costumes matter more than vocal ability and local judges score teams of friends, to its community engagement weeks — are built to pull new faces into the fold.
The long-term goal is bigger than Mobile. The founders want to take what the organization has learned — which programs work, which don’t, and how a holistic approach ties them together — and apply it to communities throughout the Gulf Coast, so that the pipeline running from cradle to college flows through every coastal neighborhood, not just the ones that already have plenty.
For an organization founded on the idea that geography shouldn’t determine destiny, that is the logical next step: making sure opportunity follows children wherever on the coast they happen to be born.