First-year students faced unprecedented challenges while transitioning from high school to university in fall 2020. The coronavirus crisis, economic downturn, social unrest, and a rapid and massive shift to remote learning altered their world in fundamental ways. This essay describes the response of one honors program toward providing extra- and co-curricular opportunities for student engagement with contemporary issues affecting the local community. While keeping the events of the world in view, the author demonstrates a virtual building of campus community. Pedagogical tools, such as service learning, complement a technological infrastructure for supporting colloquial inquiry and confronting social inequity, and they create common ground to help students shape a new post-pandemic "normal" from which to thrive.