From Music Room to Nonprofit Leader: How Kris Weimer Learned to See What Others Saw in Her First

For most of her career, Kris Weimer had a habit of talking herself out of the room before anyone else could talk her in. Her journey from music teacher to principal to nonprofit executive director is ultimately a story about what happens when you stay humble enough to trust the community that keeps showing up for you.

When colleagues nominated her for school committees, she questioned whether they had the right person. When her father urged her to pursue her administrator's license, she sat with the idea for months before finally saying yes. When a friend on a nonprofit board asked if she'd ever consider leading Startup Moxie Elkhart County, her first response was somewhere between laughter and disbelief.

"I was like, you're crazy," she recalls. "Why would I be the person for this?"

And yet, here she is — four years into leading Startup Moxie Elkhart County, a program that takes high school juniors and seniors into the heart of Elkhart County's business community, helping them discover who they might become. The story of how she got here says as much about the power of community as it does about the woman herself.

The Leader Nobody Told Her She Was

Kris taught music for nineteen years. As a specialist, she was something of a one-person island in every school she worked in — no department of fellow music teachers, no built-in professional team. Her community came from the other "specials" teachers: the art teacher, the PE teacher. Together, they watched the same 800 kids grow from kindergarten through sixth grade, comparing notes on who was thriving and who needed someone to notice them.

It was quiet, meaningful work. But people kept asking her to do more.

She was invited onto several school-wide committees and helped with initiatives. Each time, she felt the same internal resistance — a genuine uncertainty about whether she belonged at that table. "It wasn't always that I saw it in myself," she says. "Oftentimes it was somebody else seeing something that I wasn't realizing at that point."

Her father, himself a lifelong educator, was among the most persistent voices. The Weimer family took their dinners seriously — gatherings that often included her parents. And somewhere in those meals, her father kept planting the same seed: You have the leadership abilities to run a school. Go get your admin degree. It took a while for that seed to take root. But it did.

"The nudging kept happening enough, and as I would just see struggles in the school corporation — things I thought could be done differently — I started to think, maybe there's something to this."

She took it to heart and earned her administrator's license and stepped into a principal's role. Then COVID arrived, and everything changed.

When the Work Breaks Your Heart Open

The pandemic hit the families of Elkhart County hard with most students coming from blue collar families. Students showed up to school carrying the weight of households in crisis. Kris found herself absorbing as much of that weight as she could, trying to help everyone, frustrated by how much was out of her control.

It was in the middle of that exhaustion that a new door appeared — one she almost didn't walk through.

Her son was participating in Startup Moxie Elkhart County, and Kris was watching the program from the outside, close enough to see its potential. A good friend on the organization's board called and asked if she'd consider becoming its Executive Director. Her first instinct was the familiar one: deflection, doubt, a list of reasons she wasn't the right fit.

But the board saw a pattern that pointed to her potential. They reminded her that running a school had already required entrepreneurial thinking. She also realized that in teaching private flute lessons for years — she had actually run a small business. They weren't asking her to become someone new. They were asking her to bring who she already was into a new arena.

"I'm that person that has to think and process and consider for a while," she says. "But finally I came around to the idea."

Building Something Worth Showing Students

Startup Moxie Elkhart County takes juniors and seniors through an immersive entrepreneurship experience, placing them inside real businesses across the county. Kris serves as guide, advocate, curriculum leader, and — if you watch how she operates — something closer to a surrogate mentor for many of the young people in her program.

She gives students her cell number on day one. She tells them they can reach her any time, and that the offer doesn't expire at graduation.

A few years back, a student broke their leg and was struggling to get around school on crutches. Kris messaged her board immediately: Can we help this kid? Within hours, a board member had offered a cart sitting unused in their basement. She drove it to the student herself.

"I remember them being like, 'Oh my gosh — you actually did what you said you were going to do. You found me.' And I'm like, see — that's the person I want you all to become."

That moment quietly captures her entire mission. For some students, having someone following through on a promise is a revelation. Kris doesn't take that for granted. She knows not every student in the program has grown up with that kind of reliability modeled for them, and she considers it part of her job to model it now.

"I want to help students become the best version of themselves, despite what they currently know," she says. "All of us only know what we know — unless we get the chance to experience other walks of life, other paths."

That's why she takes students to a wide range of businesses — from large community employers to small startups, from owners who display their faith openly to those who keep it entirely private. One of her most memorable moments this year came when she sat down with her students over breakfast and asked them directly how they felt about visiting workplaces where the culture was more rough-edged, where language was sometimes colorful. The students who wore their faith most openly surprised her completely.

"They were like, 'We're supposed to love everyone. It doesn't matter. That's the real world.'" She shakes her head, still a little awed by it. "That blew me away. I really thought they were going to say they weren't comfortable. But they recognized what they were gaining from those visits. And it outweighed the differences."

Finding Community Every Step of the Way

Ask Kris where she finds her sense of belonging and the answer is consistent across every chapter of her life: in the people doing the work alongside her.

When she was a teacher, it was the specials team watching all 800 kids together. When her children were young, it was close friends who kept showing up — "planting seeds" as she describes it — until she and her husband finally accepted an invitation to church. For several years, that congregation became a genuine community. Sunday school where she and her husband attended for many years, shared activities that her family loved, and weekly rhythms. They were all in.

When the culture of that community shifted in ways that no longer aligned with how they understood love and decency, they stepped back. COVID accelerated the transition. Since then, their faith has stayed real but their expression of it has become quieter, less tied to a building and more tied to how they treat the people in front of them each day.

"How you live as a human being and how you interact with other people on a daily basis — that is showing people without having to say anything," she says.

Now she finds her community through Elkhart County's nonprofit network, through the Community Foundation's workshops and trainings, through the business owners she brings her students to meet, and through the students themselves. "I take the students to the businesses, but it's as much for me to learn as it is for them," she admits. "I pick up on different things that kind of go over the kids' heads, but it's just fascinating."

What She'd Tell Anyone Starting Out

After 19 years teaching, 5 years in school administration, and 4 years leading a nonprofit, Kris Weimer has earned the right to give advice. But she gives it without pretense.

Her strongest counsel for anyone new to the workforce or stepping into leadership is simple: find your people and protect that circle. Not just a mentor, but a cohort — people you can think out loud with, vent to safely, and lean on when the path gets unclear. "Be very careful who you vent to," she cautions. "The world is smaller than you think, especially with social media."

She also wants young leaders to stop treating everyone around them like competition. Her son is now starting his own business, and she has watched him build a network of people who have traveled the road before him — people willing to share hard-won lessons freely. "Not everybody is competition," she says. "In my experience, more people are willing to help and guide and give great feedback than you might expect."

And if you reach a point where you've invested years into a path — degrees, licenses, deep expertise — and you still find yourself no longer hungry for it? She has something to say about that too. She spent 24 years in education, earned every credential, and then walked away. Her kids watched her do it.

"If you're not really hungry and passionate about what you're doing, you might need to make a change. And it's okay to make a change — even if you've got a degree and a master's and a license. Realize that it happens all the time."

It is the same lesson she lives in front of her students every day. Not a polished speech. Not a curriculum item. Just a life, lived honestly, in full view.

The woman who had to be talked into every leadership opportunity turned out to be exactly the leader the room needed. She just needed enough people around her who could see it first — and the grace to eventually trust them.