About Us

Our goal is to connect and empower billions of people in every region of the world so they can improve their communities from the ground up.

Atma Connect believes in the power of “people helping people” – and in using tech for good. Atma Connect launched in grassroots communities to build resilience among people with our platform for neighbors helping neighbors. Today this platform reaches over 12 million people in Indonesia. We launched AtmaGo in Puerto Rico in late 2019, after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria, and we are connecting people and communities across the island to build resilience. In 2022, we brought this platform to Ukraine to help support mutual aid in the crisis.

We are an award-winning nonprofit organization with unique core competencies. First, we are experts in building “tech for good” solutions that connect people so they can share vital information and create bottom-up change. Second, last-mile grassroots communities and changemakers are our focus, and building trusted relationships is our forte. We marry tech and community development. In the hands of people, AtmaGo has been a tool for post-disaster community resilience, Covid-19 information dissemination, digital literacy and misinformation training, civic engagement, and coordinating environmental projects. We operate at the urban and village level.

We have recently launched the Community Impact Platform on AtmaGo to foster community and to enable and track the community impact of thousands of people working together to improve their communities, from maternal education to food scarcity to climate action and beyond.

Atma’s CEO and Founder is an environmental engineer who brings to the organization equal attention to technology, community, and nature. Atma Connect has designed tech and human engagement solutions for environmental organizations, including interactive websites and global-scale knowledge-sharing platforms, such as NatureProtects.org for The Nature Conservancy and Penatani.ID for the Penabulu Foundation and Ford Foundation.

Atma means “soul.” Our mission is to connect souls to each other, to digital tools, and to nature for things that matter to people and the planet. That broad calling means Atma Connect does a lot of things, such as collect data, verify impact, build digital hubs to enable multi-stakeholder interactions, and help village residents become online journalists. Our vision is to enable a collective emergence that knits together a new world – one where each person’s unique contribution toward collective benefit is recognized and rewarded.

During the disaster response in Palu, I used AtmaGo to find info about help, evacuee camps, volunteering opportunities, and so on…

Imelda, Central Sulawesi

Timeline of Growth

AtmaGo first launched as a way for people to share water prices, but users told us they wanted to share more information than just water prices locally—so we completely changed course and launched a new version.

After serving millions of users in cities across Indonesia, we launched AtmaGo in Puerto Rico at the end of 2019. AtmaGo allows users to share real-time information about local hazards like fire, floods and crime—and gain access to resources to grow their local economy, better educate their children, and support the health of their families.

How Atma Connect Tools Compare to Others

AtmaGo solves the place-based needs of communities better than other social apps like Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp because the content is geographically organized and useful. Our users have told us that they trust AtmaGo more than government apps like Qlue and Lapor because the content is community generated. Our strategic advantage is hyper local, user-generated content focused on people helping people.

AtmaGo is unique because it works on all kinds of phones and requires very little bandwidth. Because users engage with each other daily around basic needs and challenges, they rely on and trust the information on AtmaGo, knowing that it comes from their own community. People are far more likely to survive serious disasters and address chronic vulnerabilities when they have good social networks and connections.

Many nonprofits are turning towards apps and mobiles, yet our hybrid approach to technology combines human centered design and the development of local citizen journalists who ensure that our platform is used to share solutions, take collective action, and build community resilience.

We view vulnerable people not as objects, but as agents in change. ​​

Join Our Team!

If you are passionate about our technology, we would love to hear from you! If you have general interest, please email us at atma@atmaconnect.org