LORI HALVORSON

Hometown: Willmar, Minnesota

Artistry: Pilates instructor and personal trainer, POPin Pilates; Senior VP and Executive Director, City Year Baton Rouge

Online: @popinpilates on Instagram, popinpilates.squarespace.com, cityyear.org

Building stability and core strength are important pursuits on the individual and community levels. Lori Halvorson is balancing both.

As a Peace Corps and Teach for America veteran, the Minnesota native serves as executive director of City Year Baton Rouge, supporting area students with valuable academic, workforce and interpersonal skills. But since the pandemic, Halvorson has helped hundreds on their fitness journeys, too, as the founder and instructor of POPin Pilates, which offers a variety of classes across the city—through BREC, the YMCA, her own virtual classes and free outdoor classes at Electric Depot.

“In the past, I’ve had a tumultuous personal relationship with my body and exercise, and that’s why all this is so important to me,” she says.

Pilates first reminded Halvorson of the ballet of her youth, and in 2010, not long after moving to downtown Baton Rouge, she was hooked. Using programs designed by fitness icon Cassey Ho, she remixes the classes with her personal playlists—1980s, Broadway, Motown and more.

“The way my brain works, I need a theme to keep motivated,” she says.

Five years in, the former social media holdout who never even had a Facebook account has now amassed nearly 100,000 Instagram followers through authentic and encouraging posts.

“There’s often a very narrow-minded view of what a fitness person is or looks like, and one of my main goals is to break down that idea,” Halvorson says. “Everyone can be creative in how they exercise, and we don’t have to look just like anyone else we see on social media.”

How can fitness lead to not just a better body but a healthier, more diverse community? Halvorson strives for that and hopes to own a studio one day that is proudly welcoming to all.

“Nonprofit life can be tough, and Pilates became a safe haven for me, and helped me to manage my day job better,” Halvorson says. “Having something outside of work that is really important to me and that I put energy into has added a perspective that I needed and an important balance.”

Halvorson loves helping cancer survivors, too, leading a special class through Cancer Services of Greater Baton Rouge. While her POPin Pilates has brought more balance to her life, she wants every class to remind its participants that no matter who they are, they all share a common core.

“So many of the messages out there right now are negative and against certain people just for being who they are,” Halvorson says. “So doing something that lets people know they have a right to stand up and be themselves in this moment, in a safe space we create together, is what motivates me.”