Speak to anyone who knows Gail Shampnois well, and the word “relationship” will always come up. As the director of UVM’s Office of Student and Community Relations (OSCR), Shampnois defines her office’s work using that term. “The whole structure of the way our team works is based around relationships,” she says. 

Shampnois began to build that team in 2005, when she founded OSCR. But her ties to UVM reach back to her days as a graduate student here in 1993, when she was hired as a government relations liaison with the City of Burlington. It was a tense time, as she describes it, with fraught relations between the city and the university. 

“I got yelled at so much,” she recalls. “I said to my husband: ‘I think I can do this for about a year.’” That timeline wound up having a few revisions. “I knew deep down inside that I have this great love for Burlington, and an enormous amount of love for UVM. I had a lot of ties–I just didn’t anticipate getting squashed in between the two!”

That love for both sides of the town-gown equation kept her going well beyond that first year. In the early 2000s, Shampnois suggested focusing her energy on one important aspect of her work, the relationship between students and the surrounding community, and OSCR was born. 

“I felt really supported then by the fact that the Student Government Association had just passed a resolution looking for more support for students, and a healthier relationship between the students and their city neighbors, so the time was right, and that really excited me,” she says.

From the perspective of her colleagues, no one could have been better suited than Shampnois to build those better relations, putting the Our Common Ground qualities into action long before they were formally codified at UVM. 

“Everyone who has had the pleasure of working with Gail understands that she embodies Our Common Ground values with every interaction, every utterance, even in the most prosaic of situations,” said the colleague who nominated her for the award. 

A key factor in the success of OSCR’s work has been her openness to hear from everyone involved in the relationship of students and the community. “Another key component of her work is based on restorative practices,” notes one colleague. “The components of RP are meaningful relationships, doing things ‘with’ not ‘to’ or ‘for’ people, and accountability. Gail assists with identifying issues confronting off campus students and their neighbors and helping to develop strategies to address them based off their ideas. She never assumes what is best for them or that she knows what they need or want. These strategies always make sure to build community and incorporate personal responsibility.”

Shampnois has influenced not only the students out in the community with whom her office works, but those who have interacted with her directly at OSCR over the years. One of the people supporting her Our Common Ground nomination was first a student worker at OSCR then, after graduation, a colleague for several years. “I learned more in my three years there than I ever could have imagined,” they wrote. “Not only about a relatively niche sub-field in higher education called ‘town-gown relations’ and the practice of supporting off-campus college students and their neighbors, but also about how to live out my values, practice cultural humility, work restoratively, be a thought leader, and see and support the whole person that is before me.”

Discussing her work, Shampnois is always intent on using the word “we,” not “I.”  “We always say the heart of our work is developing community and care,” she says. She points to OSCR’s work bringing together students and neighbors in the Isham Street area as an example of an effort that significantly reduced problems and built better relationships. “So many good things that happened there came from an understanding that when people feel cared about and cared for and are invited in–that's when you can make real change,” she says.

Shampnois’ work helping make that change–bringing the university and its neighbors together constructively–is something David Cawley from Burlington’s Old East End neighborhood association noted as part of his support for her OCG nomination: "I believe that Gail's work is a crucial bridge to help the community process and address issues and seek constructive answers."

Shampnois’ work has been recognized numerous times, with two notable instances being the City of Burlington’s 2016 Peter Clavelle Award, which recognizes individuals “whose leadership has advanced social equity, environmental stewardship, quality education or economic growth and vitality in Burlington,” and the inaugural 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Town Gown Association, a global nonprofit.

After lasting far more than a year at UVM, Shampnois sees retirement somewhere in the middle distance (her husband Tom has been retired for a few years now, after a career in Vermont’s hospitality industry and real estate). But keeping a relationship with the community will always be a part of her life, she says. “I've already started volunteering at different organizations to figure out what I might want to do,” she says. “These are the things I’m drawn to, you know. These are the things that feed us.”