Two years ago, Lori Sheppeard stood inside the front doors of Strahan Hall with a nursing student who was ready to quit.
The student was older than many of her classmates. She had three grown sons and more life behind her than the average college student. Divorce, financial strain, and fear had all followed her into the building.
She didn’t know if she could finish.
Sheppeard, an EICC associate professor of psychology and sociology, disagreed.
“Two years from now, you’re going to walk down to the other end of this hall to my office and tell me you finished the nursing program,” Sheppeard said.
On May 13, two days before graduation, the nursing student came back. She remembered the hallway, the half-hour conversation, and the promise Sheppeard made before she could quite believe it herself.
Without that support, the student told her, she wasn’t sure she would have finished.
“That kind of reminded me that I’m where I’m meant to be,” Sheppeard said.
It was not the first time that spring Sheppeard had been asked to see her work through someone else’s eyes.
A few weeks earlier, WQAD Channel 8 and Ascentra Credit Union came to EICC’s Muscatine campus to present Sheppeard with a Pay It Forward Award. Her parents were there. Her sister was there. Her children were there. Faculty and staff gathered. About 10 former students came, too, and some stood in front of the room to talk about what she had meant to them.
Sachi DeWinter was one of them. As a child, DeWinter said, she felt afraid when she saw someone who was homeless. After taking Sheppeard’s class, she understood that anyone could experience homelessness, and everyone deserved respect and love. Then she acted on it.
Last winter, DeWinter and her classmates collected a carload of supplies and distributed them outside a shelter. Sheppeard remembers DeWinter putting it this way: “I feel like I’ve got a really good heart, but she made it grow.”
The award was a surprise to Sheppeard, and the words were, too.
“I think I’ve been here so long that sometimes I’m just like, this is my job,” Sheppeard said. “This is what I do.”
Sheppeard also recently received the Starfish Award, an honor reserved for people who create significant change through small, deeply meaningful actions. It fits the way she thinks about impact: one person in front of her, one need she can meet, one student who gets enough support to offer it to someone else.
That’s how the work keeps moving.
Take a Ticket
When Sheppeard’s office door is open, students know what to do.
They come in.
They ask for snacks. They ask if they can talk. They bring worries, good news, half-formed plans, and stories from the day. Sometimes they want advice. Sometimes they need resources. Sometimes they just need someone to listen.
The traffic is steady enough that a coworker once gave Sheppeard a ticket dispenser for Christmas.
Take a ticket. Wait your turn.
Sheppeard laughs about it, but the joke only works because students keep coming.
That is what Deana Dawson, one of the colleagues who nominated Sheppeard for the Pay It Forward Award, noticed when she spent time in Sheppeard’s office. She heard the conversations. She watched students move in and out. She told Sheppeard that much of what happened there was invisible to people passing by.
To Sheppeard, it didn’t feel extra.
She teaches sociology and psychology courses rooted in how people become who they are. She is also an advisor for Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) and the Gray Matters Collective, and encourages students to get involved in community service projects, leadership, and campus activities, all which give them a reason to connect.
Students leave those activities with something harder to measure. They learn to pay attention. They learn people are rarely only what they show. They learn what stress, hunger, loneliness, violence, grief, and mental health can do to a person’s choices.
They learn that sometimes help is a chair, a snack, or saying, “You can do this,” at the exact moment someone needs to hear it.
Sheppeard tells her classes a good counselor sees a counselor. If they want to care for other people, she tells them, they have to be honest about what is still hurting in themselves.
“If you're not healed, how can you go heal the world?” she tells her students.
Sheppeard says this as someone who knows healing is not finished before the work begins.
What She Knows About Support
Sheppeard wants students to look past the surface. Many are preparing for helping professions, and she wants them to learn early: people’s lives are rarely as simple as they look.
She learned that in her own life.
Sheppeard was 30 when her husband died. She had three young children, was working through her master’s program, and held multiple jobs. She also tells students she once lived through an abusive relationship while working as a social worker and helping women in dangerous situations.
She doesn’t share those things for sympathy. She shares them because helping people takes more than good intentions. It takes honesty, humility, and the ability to see more than the moment in front of you.
For years, Sheppeard worked with children in foster care and families affected by substance use and domestic violence. She saw what happens when people have nowhere to turn, and what changes when someone steps in.
Sometimes, the people she worked with challenged her.
What do you know about abuse? About hardship? About what my life is like?
Sheppeard understood the question. She also knew her answer.
What separated them was not pain. It was support.
She had people around her. Some of them did not. So she offered what she could.
“Let me be that support for you,” she’d tell her clients.
That practice followed Sheppeard into teaching. A student’s ability to keep going can depend on who is around them, who knows their name, who notices the change in their face, who can connect them to food, counseling, transportation, or one more reason not to quit.
She wants students to see that up close.
Then, she wants them to become it for someone else.
Learning to Lead
In Sheppeard’s classes, students often take what they talk about and do something with it.
Sometimes that looks like chalk messages written across campus sidewalks, short enough
to catch someone between classes and kind enough to make them pause.
Sometimes it looks like PTK students walking across campus with a camera and a few simple questions.
How are you?
What are you grateful for?
What are you worried about?
The answers became videos about shared experiences, and about how much people can have in common before they know it.
Last winter, her sociology students joined with their peers in Student Senate, All Kinds of People, and PTK in hosting a holiday craft night for children and families. Tables in the campus student center were filled with paper, glue, glitter and laughter. College students sat with kids and helped them make gifts for their families.
For the children, campus became a fun, welcoming place. For the students, care took shape. Pull out a chair. Ask a question. Stay long enough to hear the answer.
Sheppeard has looked for those openings in the community, too. A few years ago, she joined others in Muscatine to help start The Bridge, an after-school program for teenagers who needed a place to go, a meal, an activity, and adults who knew their names.
Last fall, her sociology students also collected food, baby supplies, hats, gloves, socks, and toiletries. They stocked blessing boxes. They delivered supplies to shelters.
After one delivery, a student told Sheppeard they had been discouraged about school and unsure of their purpose.
“But that day made them feel like they had purpose,” Sheppeard said.
She had not handed them purpose; she gave them a way to see it.
Back to Muscatine
Sheppeard’s path to the Muscatine campus began as a part-time idea.
After earning her master’s degree, she started teaching in EICC’s HiSET program, working with students who wanted to complete high school and move forward. Later, when EICC began offering concurrent courses to high school students, she taught sociology and psychology at Davenport North, and night classes at the Scott campus.
Then a full-time opportunity opened in Muscatine. Coming back was not simple.
Sheppeard grew up there. It was home, but not uncomplicated. She describes Muscatine as a unique community, the kind of place where who you know can matter. It had not always been easy for her.
Before she graduated high school, two teachers saw something in her she had not fully named yet. They told her she was made to make a difference in Muscatine. One told her she could leave the town different than it had left her.
So, she came back.
At MCC, the work became more personal. She was not only teaching psychology or sociology. She was helping students understand people, systems, hardship, support, and the cost of caring well.
The same things she had learned in social work.
The same things she had lived.
Six Months
This year, Sheppeard has been carrying more than many people knew.
She has stage 4 cancer. She has been living with it for two years.
In January, Sheppeard told her doctors what mattered most in the months ahead. Her youngest son was finishing high school, and she did not want him spending those final months watching her sick.
She stopped chemo medication and started an alternative medication, with a plan to reassess June 1.
For those six months, she wanted him to see her healthy. She wanted to watch him walk across the stage.
He did, and she did, too.
Cancer is not the center of Sheppeard’s story. But that decision says something about how she loves people: she wants to be there.
Some days, that meant standing in front of a class while sick. Sometimes she told students to work together, stepped into the bathroom to throw up, then came back.
Students noticed.
They began emailing her when they had colds, telling her they did not want to get her sick. They kept distance when they needed to protect her health. The care she had spent years giving started moving back toward her.
Sheppeard tells students they inspire her to come to work on days when she does not feel well.
“I’m not always perfect,” she said. “But I think that most days people would say, I show up.”
What She Wants to Leave
Graduation has always carried a little grief for Sheppeard.
Every year, students walk across the stage, and she feels proud. This is where she wanted them to be. This was the point. But there is loss in it, too. She wishes them well, then misses seeing them every day.
This year felt different.
Her youngest child was graduating. Her husband had been gone 16 years. Her health was uncertain. Sheppeard found herself thinking about the question people do not ask out loud until life makes them: What do I want to leave behind?
If she is not here, what does she want students to say? What does she want them to remember from the small piece of life they shared with her?
Her answer is not complicated.
“I just want them to know that we care,” Sheppeard said. “We care about their mental health. We care about their success. We care about what’s going on in their life.”
That care has taken many shapes: a hallway conversation, a busy office, a class project that turns into a shelter delivery, a student who once needed help becoming the person who offers it.
Sheppeard is still looking at what students need next: stronger mental health support, help with basic needs, and more ways to connect with resources before they are in crisis.
For her, noticing the need is usually the first step toward doing something about it.
What the Awards Showed Her
Sheppeard did not expect the awards.
She did not expect her parents and sister to walk into class. She did not expect her children to be there. She did not expect her colleagues and students to stand in front of the room and tell her, in front of everyone, what she had meant to them.
For years, she had called it the job.
The snacks. The office visits. The joyful or hard conversations after class. The trips, projects, club meetings, service work, and moments when a student needed one person to say, keep going.
Then the students said it back to her.
They said it in front of her family. They said it in front of colleagues. They said it in the same kind of room where she had spent years trying to help them see themselves clearly.
The awards honor Sheppeard, but her work is not waiting in a plaque or an award.
It is already in the people she taught.