Kyle and Megan Mazurek’s romance began in 2008, when both worked at the Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber of Commerce. Megan, then a recent EMU grad, did marketing, and Kyle was the chamber’s lobbyist.
“We started hanging out as friends,” Megan, thirty-six, recalls over coffee at the Kerrytown Sweetwaters, her smooth blond hair brushing the shoulders of her black knit dress. “We were the youngest ones at the Chamber.”
Kyle, forty-three, boyish-looking and in jeans, chimes in. “We’d be out doing one of the fun networking events, getting to meet people and … you know, developing our relationship.”
They were married in 2016 at St. Mary’s Student Parish. (The rehearsal dinner was across the street at one of their favorite hangouts, the Original Cottage Inn.) Today they are among Ann Arbor’s consummate volunteers—“a power couple with a strong sense of community,” in the words of Neutral Zone executive director Lori Roddy.
Megan was Washtenaw United Way’s youngest-ever board member, and three years ago, president and CEO Pam Smith enlisted the couple to cochair its annual campaign. “Their volunteer and philanthropic leadership is extraordinary,” Smith says.
Between them, the couple serve on half a dozen boards, plus various committees, and they also take on the occasional fundraising gig. “It’s constant,” says Megan, of nonprofits’ requests for help. “It’s an honor. But there are only so many hours of the day.”
A Saline native, Megan is a Realtor with Charles Reinhart. Dave Lutton, her former boss, puts her “in the top twenty-five percent of local Realtors” in sales, and in 2021, her peers voted her “Realtor of the Year.” It helps, she says, that she’s got “great connections.”
Kyle, from Spring Lake near Grand Haven, recently started a community relations job for the electric power company ITC after more than a decade doing similar work for Comcast. (A U-M grad, he also has a law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law but changed course after a short stint as a prosecutor in Muskegon.)
The couple are friendly and candid. Asked how their friends might describe them, Megan immediately declares that her husband “is the serious one here.”
“Megan brings the energy and the fun,” Kyle concurs, smiling.
“Kyle and Megan are a beautiful pair,” says Roddy of the Neutral Zone, where Megan is an occasional volunteer and Kyle is a board member who, she says, has “really engaged the community to support the Neutral Zone.” He also serves on an advisory committee for the Ann Arbor Chamber, and a few years back, was the only straight guy on the board of the Jim Toy Community Center.
The couple’s relative youth makes them especially appealing to nonprofits struggling to enlist younger volunteers and donors. Though high-tech companies employ many young workers, relatively few of them get engaged in the larger community.
“It’s one of the big discussions on boards and committees that we’re on,” Kyle says. “You know, where are they giving their time?”
Megan acknowledges that their involvements are “a little bit unusual” for their generation. Growing up in small towns with engaged parents may explain their willingness to step forward. “Spring Lake is a very tight community,” Kyle says, adding that his parents, both teachers, impressed on him the importance of public service. Megan’s mother worked as a secretary in the Saline schools and her dad, an accountant, served on the board of the district’s foundation. At Saline High, she was on student council, swam competitively, and organized a special prom to raise money for the Evangelical Home (now EHM Senior Solutions).
Both Mazureks are well-organized, especially Kyle—he “never has anything in his inbox,” Megan marvels. It’s an essential skill for people who are always looking at budgets and planning big-time fundraisers.
Megan shies away from cold-call fundraising, partly because it gets old hitting up her friends for contributions. She’d rather plan events and promote them—which she does regularly on Facebook.
The couple gets a kick out of organizing happenings like a pre-Covid happy hour at the Circ Bar to raise money for United Way. She and Kyle, along with Dave and Louise Lutton, bought drinks for everyone who wrote a check or signed a pledge card, and raised close to $10,000.
Megan was just twenty-four when she joined her first board: Ele’s Place, which offers grief support for young people. “It pulls on your heartstrings,” she says. The connection became even more personal when she learned that a child she coached in swimming had been helped there after the death of her mother.
Both fundraisers and real estate shut down when Covid hit in March 2020. Realtors weren’t allowed to show houses for approximately seven weeks, and every day, Megan recalls, panicked would-be buyers were on the phone. “I spent a lot of time counseling people but, like, not knowing what to tell them.”
Soon, however, almost everyone in town was on Zoom—a condition that, to some degree, persists today, to the couple’s regret. “I don’t think people are as engaged,” Megan says. “They’re on their phones.” Adds Kyle: “You miss the natural networking” of meeting in person.
Things are particularly busy for the couple right now, as they recently moved into their newly constructed home in Dexter. “We purposely are right on the edge of Ann Arbor and Dexter, because we still are anticipating being very involved in the Ann Arbor community,” Megan says. She’s currently doing homework for her newest board, Girls Group, while Kyle is planning events to celebrate Neutral Zone’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
The Mazureks don’t make a fuss about Valentine’s Day—though Kyle says he will probably buy a “card with attitude” at Megan’s favorite store, Rock Paper Scissors. But they enjoy sharing their engagement story.
On Christmas Eve 2014, they celebrated with Kyle’s extended family, which included a lot of young cousins. “Santa comes to bring every kid, like, one gift,” Megan recalls. “And he always gives one of the adults a lump of coal” in a small bag.
Somewhat to her embarrassment, “Santa called me up to give me the coal bag.” But along with the coal, she felt something that might be a ring.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God. I wasn’t 100 percent sure but … suddenly, Kyle was down on one knee, proposing.
Megan was speechless. “Which was funny,” she says, “because I’m usually so talkative.”
It was an auspicious beginning for one of the town’s most connected couples.
