Hi, I'm Audrey.
Farm kid. Educator. Strategist. Three-time 'good troublemaker' for democracy. Cat person.
I grew up on a family farm on the central coast of California, where my parents were among the first to plant wine grapes in the Paso Robles area and where I learned to work from cattle, draft horses, and 4-H record books. FFA gave me my first taste of leadership — State Officer, American Farmer Degree — and my first calling: helping people understand agriculture, and helping agriculture understand itself.
I came to Chico for college in 2003 and never really left. It's my forever home. After earning my degree in agricultural science and education at Chico State, I moved to rural El Salvador for a year, where I learned Spanish, learned tropical agriculture from cooperative technicians, and started a youth garden club with an organization called Cristosal — the beginning of a relationship with human rights work that would eventually take me onto their board, and into the board presidency of what became the largest human rights organization in Central America.
Back in Chico, I spent five and a half years at Chico State's College of Agriculture — teaching, coordinating outreach, growing enrollment by 88%, and earning my master's degree in agricultural education. My thesis won first place in education research across the entire CSU system, and it planted the question that has driven my career since: what actually makes people and organizations change?
I chased that question through a year in Ghana managing agricultural education volunteers, then through six years at Vivayic, a national learning design consultancy, where I designed strategy and learning solutions for organizations from The World Bank to the National FFA Organization and managed some of the firm's largest accounts.
In 2021, I went out on my own as The Denney Group. Feeding America — the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States — became my anchor client, and I spent three years building tools the food bank network still uses: the Product Sourcing Plan process, the Service Requirements assessment tools, the Disaster Services Learning Continuum, e-learning, playbooks, and program evaluations. Since then, my work has taken me inside food banks across the country — Indiana, the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, California — doing strategic plans, disaster plans, funded grants, and the systems that make them real. And the part I love most is the part that never changes: getting genuinely fascinated by how each organization works, and helping the people inside it do what they already knew was possible.
And in between all of that, I ran for Congress. Three times. I'm proud of those campaigns — we raised millions of dollars in small donations from tens of thousands of people, and we showed up in every community in a district the country had written off. The campaigns taught me things no consulting engagement could: how to build a movement from nothing, how to listen to people who don't agree with you, and how much people will trust you when you tell them the truth.
Different chapters. Same job: helping good people accomplish hard things.
These days I live in downtown Chico with my two cats, Nash and Harper Eleanor. When I'm not on site with a client somewhere, you'll find me in my greenhouse, in my garden, or in a book.