“Your body is a temple.” It’s a scriptural metaphor we hear so often we almost stop listening to it. But think about what that actually means: maintenance. Upkeep. Care. It’s hard work. Not everyone wants to do it, even if everyone ought to.
And that’s because it can be really inconvenient. You work an eight-hour shift that starts after you get the kids to school. And if you’re lucky enough to squeeze in an hour at the gym, you don’t know where to start. But what if you thought of the gym as more of a playground? A place where you can work on your body with a little help from a friendly coach.
If that sounds more enticing, maybe pay a visit to Bri Nelson. Bri is the club manager at Anytime Fitness here in Lafayette. Anytime is a franchise of gyms with a pretty obvious hook – they’re open 24-hours. That’s the “anytime” part of the name.
Bri Nelson, Club Manager at Anytime Fitness in Lafayette. There are 6,000 Anytime Fitness locations across the US and around the world. If you’re a member at Bri’s club here in Lafayette you can go to any of them anywhere, literally, anytime, 24/7.
Bri herself discovered fitness as a teenager. She loves dancing, roller skating, hiking, shooting sports. She’s the kind of person who tries just about everything. And she brings that openness to how she runs the gym.
Bri grew up in Charenton and studied biochemistry at Southeastern Louisiana University while working as a server and bartender to support herself. She was interested in going into the restaurant business, but a conversation with the owner of the Anytime Fitness she went to turned into a job offer. She came in as an administrative assistant, moved into coaching, then personal training sales, and eventually became club manager.
The Lafayette location has about 600 members, though the 24-hour model means you’ll never see them all at once. On any given day, maybe 250 people are working out. Bri oversees all of it. Every new member gets a consultation and a coach who helps figure out what they actually need. That’s the philosophy at Anytime Fitness: accessibility. And not just because it’s open 24/7.
Caring for your body is hard enough. What about making time for the environment?
Louisiana is blessed with natural beauty, but you wouldn’t always know it by how we treat it. Maybe we ought to convince folks to take a little more pride in where they live. That’s where Jenee Dansdill comes in.
Jenee Dansdill, Community Engagement Manager at Parish Proud, a local-business funded organization dedicated to creating and maintaining public spaces, from parks to schools and everything green in between
Jenee is the Community Engagement Managerof Parish Proud, a nonprofit focused on environmental stewardship and community beautification. She grew up in a house where nature mattered and she went on to study environmental science. That proved to be a tough industry to break into. So she volunteered. She worked in Lafayette coffee shops during the day and gave her evenings to the Bayou Vermilion Preservation Association.
After about a year, that volunteer work opened a door—a civil engineering firm hired her to work on watershed planning and water quality projects. But she kept volunteering, moved into leadership at BVPA, and basically ran two jobs for years until she became Community Engagement Manager at Parish Proud.
Parish Proud organizes community cleanups, school restoration projects, tree planting, environmental education. They’ve inventoried over 400 trees in Girard Park to support future grant applications. Each year they organize a Parish Proud day, sending a blitz of volunteers to clean up and beautify a local school or park. And they’re doing it with two full-time employees and one intern.
Christiaan Mader, Dylan Babineaux, Jenee Dansdill, Bri Nelson, Out to Lunch at Gravy in Downtown Lafayette
Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Gravy in downtown Lafayette. Photos by Astor Morgan.
