Builder.
Strategist.
Architect.

Her Story

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.

A Career Built on Real Stakes

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 don't. As Founding Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance's Atlanta Chapter, she built an organization from nothing: creating infrastructure, forging strategic alliances, and winning a federal campaign that secured minimum wage and overtime protections for homecare workers across the country.

Since 2017, as CEO of ProGeorgia, she has built what she calls "the engine" — a $22 million, 61-organization statewide civic engagement table operating in all 159 Georgia counties. Under her leadership, ProGeorgia has touched 13 million voters, registered 277,000 new voters, and regranted $19 million to frontline partner organizations. She governed through a pandemic, a racial reckoning, Hurricane Helene, and sustained legislative attacks on voting rights — and the coalition held.

Our Turn & the Women of Color Initiative

In 2022, Tamieka founded Our Turn — a nonprofit dedicated to political education, leadership development, and collective power within Black-led movements. Its flagship program, the Women of Color Initiative, is a statewide platform she built because she watched women who looked like her move mountains for everyone else's political agendas. Our Turn creates the conditions for those women to build power for themselves — with the governance authority and institutional backing to match their political labor.

Tamieka's leadership is relational, rigorous, and grounded in community. She believes that healing and joy are not distractions from the work — they are essential to sustaining it. She cherishes her two children, creative expression, time in nature, and supporting grassroots arts spaces across Atlanta.