Natalie Stouffer showed up at a stranger's house to learn a game she'd never played. Now she and co-founder Bethany Jordan run Après Mahjong, a Park City instruction business with 10 instructors, more than 1,000 members, and a new parlor at 136 Heber Ave.

"They're like, 'Hey, do you want to come to this person's house, who you don't know, to learn this game you know nothing about?'" Stouffer told TownLift. "I was like, 'Yeah, sure.'"

The pair met through overlapping Park City friend circles during the COVID-era mahjong resurgence that brought younger players to a game long associated with older generations. Jordan, a former NBC News producer who worked on the Today Show and Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, had moved to Park City full-time after years in high-pressure media. Stouffer, a former public school teacher and district administrator raised in a military family, had been looking for a way to combine her education background with entrepreneurship.

Their roles split naturally. Jordan handles finances, sales, design, scheduling, and local business partnerships. Stouffer designs lessons, trains instructors, manages social media, and runs league and tournament operations. Their instructors range in age from their twenties to their seventies. Most started as students.

Stouffer credits mahjong with helping her recover from a serious ski-accident concussion. She was forgetting names and couldn't finish sentences before the game became part of her cognitive therapy.

Après Mahjong now offers structured lessons, leagues, open-play sessions, and special events at its Heber Avenue location, which includes a small-group teaching space in Suite 106 and a larger parlor upstairs. The business is planning a mahjong retreat at a local Park City hotel with breakout sessions for other small mahjong business owners.

Across town, another Park City woman wrapped up a chapter of community building on June 30. Jennifer Billow, vice president of advancement at the Park City Education Foundation, retired after 15 years with the nonprofit.

Her final big event was the 17th annual Running with Ed on Saturday, May 16, a 28.6-mile, eight-leg relay that passes all six Park City schools. The 2026 race drew 800 runners and 100 volunteers and raised more than $272,000 toward a $300,000 goal, according to KPCW. The event has been named Park City's best fundraiser for 10 consecutive years by The Park Record's Park City's Best magazine.

Billow came to Utah in the late 1980s with Nestlé, expecting a two-year assignment. She and her husband Greg settled in Silver Springs around 1992. After her children attended Parley's Park Elementary, she volunteered in classrooms and served in PTA leadership before becoming a substitute teacher following the 2008 financial crisis.

She joined PCEF in July 2011 as marketing and events manager, hired by founding executive director Abby McNulty. Billow told the Park Record in May that the departure was bittersweet: "Working with them and the committee to build this race and get it to where it is today is something you don't get to do very often."

PCEF, founded in 1986, currently reaches 4,200 students, invests $1.8 million annually in Park City schools, and funds 100 programs. At the PCEF gala, Billow made a major personal gift in honor of her late father and her grandmother, the first woman on her local school board.

The Park City School District will fund four licensed art teachers for all four elementary schools starting next year, taking over PCEF's $150,000 Elementary Visual Arts program and freeing those dollars for new initiatives under current executive director Ingrid Whitley.