Awbury Arboretum Association, Inc.

Field Studies is a environmental education enrichment program at Awbury Arboretum providing field trips to the Arboretum for schools, day cares, community centers, faith-based organizations, and homeschoolers since 1976. Sessions engage preschool- to high-school-aged children with the natural world at Awbury through ecology, biology, agriculture, and horticulture, with the environment as an integrating context for learning. Through our Field Studies Public School Partnership, Awbury provides free lessons to all public schools in the Philadelphia School District. In 2022, as Philadelphia slowly climbed out from under the pandemic, we served over 13 organizations; 83% of students served received free lessons.

Summer Adventures at Awbury Arboretum are day camps for children ages 6-14 that run from mid-June through early August. Led by credentialed adult educators with years of experience, our camps have a low camper to counselor ratio, and are designed to encourage outdoor exploration, creativity, teamwork, and critical thinking while engaging different types of learners. Camps are structured around themes and incorporate elements of a traditional sleep-away camp (fire-building, archery, survival skills, team-building, group games), as well as engaging children in environmental science, culinary arts, agriculture, and imaginative play. To ensure that families of all financial means have access to Awbury’s summer camp programming, we make it a priority to provide over 1/5 of our Summer Adventures camp slots through scholarships/subsidies to underserved children in our local zip codes. Summer Adventures Camps serve over 170 children a year.

Starting in 2017, Awbury Arboretum has chosen a theme for each calendar year. This theme provides the basis for a year-round series of classes, workshops, and lectures for adults and families based on that theme and relating to environmental sustainability, experiences in nature, arts and crafts, ecology, horticulture, history, and healthy living. 2023 is the Year of Trees and includes monthly tree identification hikes along with the lectures and workshops.

Awbury regularly hosts 6 free public art exhibitions a year – both within the parlors of the Francis Cope House, and outside in the Arboretum’s landscape – and music and dance performances. Recent highlights include bird prints by Julie Zahn, animal paintings hung from trees in the landscape by Ann Hopkins Wilson, monoprints by Stephen Kennedy, and sculptures and collages of found objects by sculptor/printmaker Katie VanVliet. Awbury has also hosted music festivals, outdoor circus arts performances, and dance performances. In the summer, Awbury hosts a blues series in partnership with the Philly Blues Society.

Awbury offers free wellness walks twice a week (more in summer), and fee-based and donation-based classes in yoga (including chair yoga for people with mobility/strength issues), Afro-House dance, Zumba, martial arts, qi gong, cardio, hula hooping, and forest bathing.

Every Sunday from April through late October, The Farm at Awbury hosts a Farm Market with local organic produce and crafts vendors. In addition to the market, there are a variety of free activities, crafts, games, walks with goats, children's scavenger hunts, agricultural demonstrations, cooking workshops, nutritional workshops, poetry workshops, open air concerts, wellness classes, children's science demonstrations, and presentations/demonstrations by our Partners. Sometimes food vendors are on site, and occasionally vendors sign up to sell crafts or art. These weekly happenings attract up to 300 people every Sunday.