About

My name is Atma Meek, and I am dedicated to building a world that meets people at the worst moments of their lives with healing.

Healing has to happen somewhere. That is the part that our systems get wrong, and it is most of what I have learned in over twenty years of this work. You cannot ask a person to get better in a place where their whole body is correctly telling them not to relax.

Arrest. Overdose. Eviction. The morning someone walks out of a prison gate with a bus ticket and no address. Each of those moments belongs to a different system, and those systems were built separately, funded separately, and judged separately. Almost none of them are safe enough for a person to change.

My work covers reentry, homelessness, behavioral health, recovery, and violence prevention. Not five specialties. One problem seen through five doors.

I know it from both sides.

I took a life when I was in my twenties. There is a family owed privacy, and they have lived with what I did every day since. I don't detail it here. I was sentenced to ninety-nine years, served twenty-six of them in a Texas maximum security prison, and came home in my fifties.

The standard pointed outward. I was exempt from it. That is what changed.

I got clean in prison and have stayed that way. I spent more than a decade teaching inside before I had a release date worth counting toward. Not long after coming home I went back in, voluntarily, to keep teaching. Then I lost my housing and spent most of a year sleeping in a greenbelt.

Today I sit on the leadership council of the agency that coordinates Austin's response to homelessness, and co-chair its systems improvement committee. People treat those as two different kinds of credential. I have never been able to separate them.

I have rebuilt and run a department, designed theories of change and the frameworks to test them, and trained and supervised the peer workforce. UT's School of Law and its forensic social work program bring me in to speak. These days I am Programs and Partnerships Coordinator in the Strategic Initiatives Office at The Other Ones Foundation, and I serve on boards and committees across reentry, homelessness, substance use response, and community safety. I founded Impact Reentry, and the Amparo Peacemaking Project.

I started training in the martial arts as a boy and they have been part of my life ever since, shaping far more than the physical. People assume a practice like that is about capability. Mine is about what you do with capability you have already used once and decided never to use again.

I live in Austin with my partner, Tina, and our two cats and a dog.

Most people know me as Atma. It isn't a nickname.

This site is the hub for most of my work. Everything I write ends up here, sorted by subject: violence prevention, reentry, homelessness, criminal justice, policing, and the systems thinking that runs underneath all of it. New pieces go out by email as they publish. If you are working on one of these problems inside an organization, or you want someone to come speak about it, there is a page for that.

The people closest to a problem usually understand something the system does not. Most of my work has been getting that understanding into the room where decisions get made, and building rooms where a person is safe enough to become someone else.