Teller Of Other People's Stories™
Not stories he's heard. Lives he's shared.

Minneapolis-area resident and North Dakota native Patrick John Atkinson earned two undergraduate degrees at Minnesota State University Moorhead and a Master's in Nonprofit Management at Regis University. He has also studied at the University of Oxford and Harvard University. After graduating from MSUM in 1981, he turned down several lucrative corporate offers to work instead with runaways, children involved in survival sex, and gang members in New York City. Two years later he moved to Central America and began an international career in war-zone reconciliation and post-war reconstruction that continues today.

He is the founder and CEO of The GOD'S CHILD Project (GodsChild.org), and the founder and executive director of the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited & Missing Persons (ITEMP.org), The Atkinson Center (AtkinsonCenter.org), and La Asociación Nuestros Ahijados in Guatemala. He has founded several other charities worldwide. From 2003 to 2019, he served as an expert witness in federal court on international human trafficking and violence-related asylum cases. He has received numerous human rights awards, among them the Guatemalan Congressional Medal, the Legion of Santiago for lifetime humanitarian service, Benefactor of Antigua (last awarded 450 years ago), and several honorary citizenships.

His TEDx talk, "Living without Restraint," has been viewed more than a million times. He appears in the Sundance Film Festival documentary The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez, and is the subject of Monica Hannan's biography, The Dream Maker.

Patrick has written or co-written eight books. A Message for My Child won the Christian Choice Award Gold Medal and appeared in thirteen languages in book and poster form. One Guatemalan press printed 500,000 copies for free distribution across Central America, and the book is part of the formal reading curriculum in India. The Powerful You! took first place in the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Two more books are in active development. BANANITO: The Lost Boy the Toughest Streets Couldn't Kill, written with Miguel Angel Alvarez Paz, is Miguel Angel's memoir of surviving the streets of Guatemala as a small boy. Another Saturday Night and I Ain't Got Nobody, written with his wife, matchmaker Julie Spangler, is a dating guide for people over forty.

He was granted U.S. patent 5,705,212 for a food package with an enclosed eating utensil, an idea he got as a Boy Scout tired of camp forks that always ended up in the mud just before dinnertime. Since then, some 165 later patent applications have cited his, including filings by General Mills, Nestlé, Kellogg, and Starbucks.

Patrick is available for podcasts, radio, and speaking, in English or Spanish.

When not being shot at, knifed, caught in car-bombings, or traveling worldwide advocating on behalf of abused, abandoned, and trafficked people, Patrick lives at Hippo Wallow Pond, his family home outside the Twin Cities, with pieds-à-terre in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Antigua, Guatemala.