Jeanie served as general manager and CEO at The Merc Co-op in Lawrence, Kansas for more than 10 years, overseeing many expansions and leading a decade of exponential growth before leaving to become a national organizational development consultant in 2009. As a consultant, Jeanie has directly supported close to 150 organizations across the US and Canada so far, and hundreds more through her online retail training programs.
In addition to her work as a consultant, she leads the GM Development Program team and other project leadership roles within Columinate. Jeanie is a trusted adviser and collaborator and presenter to national industry leaders and associations, including National Co-op Grocers and Rural Grocery Initiative, and serves on the board of Food Co-op Initiative, a national non-profit dedicated to the support of start-up cooperatively owned grocery stores. In 2022, she founded the new grocery store leadership program, Mighty Community Markets, https://columinate.coop/events/mighty-community-markets/
, which is designed to teach critical skills to managing locally controlled independent grocery stores of all kinds, locations and sizes. That program won the CCMA Award for Cooperative Innovation and Achievement at the 2023 CCMA conference.