Early spring flowers are slowly emerging across Awbury Arboretum in Germantown, fueled by March rain and temperate conditions. As the 100-year-old public garden and farm transitions into a new season, it’s experiencing another major change.
Chris Steinmeier started as Awbury’s new executive director on Tuesday. The Germantown educator was chosen out of nearly 100 candidates, after Sara Stevenson stepped down from her three-year tenure to lead Friends of the Wissahickon.
Steinmeier will lead a team of five full-time staff members, in addition to seasonal and part-time employees, through the rest of the arboretum’s 2025-28 Strategic Plan. He will be tasked with supporting the financial growth of Awbury, as well as expanding its programming and community engagement. Steinmeier said he’s been in good hands, receiving help from the interim executive director, Ann O’Brien.
“I intend to focus a lot on relationship building,” Steinmeier told the Local. “I intend to be out and about meeting with groups, organizations, leaders … really trying to understand how they experience Awbury and where there’s space for connection making.”
When he saw the job listing, Steinmeier said he jumped at the opportunity to apply. The Germantown resident has 25 years of experience in the education field, 15 of which he spent in nonprofit leadership roles. His life’s work is dedicated to fostering healthy learning environments for young people and ensuring families have equitable access to the services of a nonprofit. He hopes to continue his impact as Awbury’s new executive director.
“I don’t have an arborist or horticulturalist background. I come from education, but I knew from my experience with Awbury that there’s a lot of opportunity for education,” he said. “I was thinking about it in terms of partnering with people who really understand the nature aspects of it way more than I do — and supporting them in their work and looking for how to use the space and education to make a more meaningful, broader connection with the community around Awbury.”
Mali Skotheim, chair of Awbury’s board of directors, said the board was attracted by Steinmeier’s nonprofit experience, Germantown connections and collaborative attitude. She hopes Steinmeier will help expand Awbury’s community partnerships and its education programs, such as the summer camp, School Day Off Camps and the nature-based education program called Field Studies, she said.
“We didn’t go out looking for an educator, but the fact that he has that background is really valuable for Awbury, because he’s going to be able to really understand those programs so thoroughly. And I think in a lot of ways, it makes sense to strengthen the programs that are already the strongest,” she said.
The Harrisburg native discovered his interest in education while working at a summer camp in North Carolina after college. He taught different grades, from kindergarten through middle school. From 2005-7, he worked at the Eckerd Youth Challenge Program in Florida, which served moderate-risk adolescent males in a residential, therapeutic environment.
As a teacher, his criticisms of the traditional education system grew, he said. In his view, the standardized curriculum and strict regulations seemed to hold teachers and students back more than help them.
“It took years before I was able to articulate that it’s up to the individual people to be able to define what success means to them and to help them get there. And within a lot of conventional schooling, you don’t have that because you have test scores, you have grades. And you have schools and teachers that are punished if your test scores aren’t good enough,” he said.
He earned his master’s degree and doctorate in educational leadership at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and later served as the program director for Save a Mind Foundation, which aims to increase the high school graduation rate for students from low-income urban communities.
In 2015, he co-founded Natural Creativity as a resource center for families who chose homes chooling and other unconventional education paths. Natural Creativity, in Germantown, practices self-directed education, a method designed to empower students to set their own learning goals and direction.
One goal at Natural Creativity was to remove financial barriers to home schooling, he said.
Mt. Airy resident Lorraine Rice enrolled her youngest daughter into Natural Creativity in 2017, her education consisting of both homeschooling and the center. At the time, Rice was in graduate school and “money was tight.” She said Steinmeier was empathetic to their situation, and allowed them to initially pay a rate that was more affordable while the family helped the nonprofit in other ways.
“Someone who is really looking for those services and would really benefit from what they offer — they don’t want anyone to be closed out because of [tuition]. They try to work with people,” she said.
Now at 15 and in the teen program, her daughter is a confident artist with plans to sell her fiber art at the Queen & Rook Fantasy Faire.
Since its founding, Natural Creativity has secured around $5 million in funding, created business plans and expanded its facilities, staff and network.
In 2022, Natural Creativity’s leadership began rethinking its business model to rely less on grants and contributors, after seeing philanthropic shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the following year, it moved towards an earned-income business model but it was projected to run out of funding in early 2025. And funding that had been pledged to cover that gap did not materialize, Steinmeier said. He chose to step down in March 2025, so the program could remain open and the staff wouldn’t be required to take significant pay cuts.
“We just needed help to get over these next two years to fully flip the business model,” he said.
The organization has 70 students as of this month.
In his new position, Steinmeier wants to expand Awbury’s role as an accessible learning space. The 56-acre green space offers camp scholarships for qualifying local families and hosts free walks as part of the Prescribe Outside program. Social justice is a core value of the arboretum’s Quaker founders. He wants to make the entrances more inviting and build relationships with local community groups.
“I just feel good about how magical this space is, and I want to create as many opportunities for people to experience that,” he said.
And he doesn’t want to do it alone. As a leader, he says he prefers to solicit different points of view and believes progress is dependent on collaboration.
The Awbury staff “are superstars as far as the care and stewardship of this space. I want to make sure that they have opportunities to shine and build up the programs that they’ve wanted,” he said.
Tess Liebersohn, the family support coordinator and teen program facilitator at Natural Creativity, said Steinmeier encouraged her to pursue ideas that interested her and was willing to listen to her concerns. She anticipates that he will excel at Awbury like he has in other informal learning spaces.
“He’s very aware of how to create sanctuaries for alternative ideas,” she said, “so that they can provide nourishment, peace, learning, discovery and connection to the people who use it.”
Abby Weiss is an environmental reporter for the Local and a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at abby@chestnuthilllocal.com.