Our Founder
Tamieka Atkins
For nearly two decades, Tamieka Atkins has built political and civic power that communities own for themselves.
Founder of Our Turn
From San Fernando to the South
Tamieka Atkins was born in San Fernando, Trinidad, and raised in South Jamaica, Queens, a community shaped by over-policing, economic disinvestment, and the particular exclusion reserved for Black neighborhoods in America. She came to American democracy not as a birthright but as a system worth understanding, contesting, and building. She learned early that the systems governing people's lives were neither neutral nor inevitable. They were built, which meant they could be rebuilt.
Since moving to Atlanta in 2010, she has spent fifteen years at the intersection of organizing, governance, and institutional strategy, developing a singular understanding of how civic infrastructure actually works, who it leaves out, and what it takes to change it.
“Real change doesn’t happen to communities. It happens when communities have the infrastructure, the resources, and the authority to lead it themselves.”
At Amnesty International USA, she developed the institutional governance fluency that would define her executive career, learning how complex, mission-driven organizations hold together under pressure, and what it costs when they do not. As Founder and Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance's Atlanta Chapter, she built the chapter from nothing, creating its infrastructure, forging strategic alliances, and winning a dollar raise for home care workers in Georgia. The chapter she built became the blueprint for We Dream in Black, the network where the Alliance's Black domestic worker organizing now happens across the country.
She built ProGeorgia into a 61-organization statewide civic engagement table operating in all 159 Georgia counties. Over ten years, she deployed $38 million in direct and indirect funds, including $22 million regranted to frontline partner organizations. Under her leadership, the coalition's partners registered more than 250,000 new voters. She governed through a pandemic, a racial reckoning, Hurricane Helene, and sustained attacks on voting rights, and the coalition held.
A career built on real stakes
Our Turn and the Women of Color Initiative
In 2022, Tamieka founded Our Turn, the global home for the leadership and power of Black women across the diaspora. She built it because she watched women who looked like her move mountains for everyone else's agenda. Our Turn creates the conditions for those women to build power for themselves, with the institutional backing to match their political labor. Its Georgia-based Women of Color Initiative carries that work on the ground.
Tamieka's leadership is relational, rigorous, and grounded in community. She believes healing and joy are not distractions from the work, they are what sustains it. She cherishes her two children, creative expression, time in nature, and the grassroots arts spaces of Atlanta.
“My work is not just a career. It is a commitment to make sure the people closest to injustice have the tools, the infrastructure, and the authority to lead the change they deserve.”