R.K. Janmeja Singh, known to his many friends as Meji, was born in 1931 to a Sikh family in India’s Punjab. He came to the United States in 1958 for graduate school and received his Ph.D. from Boston University. His passion as a clinical psychologist has been conflict resolution and community mental health, focused on a consultee-based approach. His pioneering work has taken him to dozens of countries as a professor, practitioner, and consultant, serving corporations and youth centers, prisons and medical schools. He taught psychology at the University of California Berkeley for 16 years and was dean of Rosebridge Graduate School of Integrative Psychology for 12. At San Francisco’s Letterman Army Medical Center he was a mental health consultant for 17 years. In 1993 he founded the Hume Behavioral Health and Training Center, a post-graduate training institute in what Meji called “consultee-based community health” in a 1964 publication.
Meji has been a revered faith leader in the Sikh community of the Bay Area. For decades he has taught Gurbani (Sikh sacred texts) to children and young adults, largely within the context of different gurdwaras, the sanctuaries where Sikhs gather to worship, study, and eat together. He was a founder and later the chair of the Sikh Center of San Francisco-Bay Area and of the Sikh Foundation of North America. Since childhood, Meji’s faith and practice has been interfaith affirming. As a local/global interfaith activist he has been engaged with United Religions Initiative, the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, and the Ik Onkar Peace Foundation, an interfaith organization he founded.