Zoe Tate ’27 has never treated community as a feel-good concept or a box to check. To her, it is infrastructure, the one thing that holds when everything else gives way.
 

“The value of community is, like, incomparable to anything else,” says Zoe, whose friends call her Z. “Time and time again, I fall back on my community, and I think it’s important that you invest in that, because if you don’t, you’re not going to have it.”
 

That belief – quiet, unflashy, and deeply held – is why Z will be recognized Thursday night at the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration at UNC Greensboro. The event, a collaboration among UNCG, Greensboro College, Guilford College, Guilford Technical Community College, and North Carolina A&T, honors students whose lives reflect King’s legacy of service and moral clarity.
 

Z is not entirely comfortable with that framing.
 

“I think just helping people has kind of always been the goal,” she says. “I think it’s the right thing to do so to be recognized for that seems a little weird.”
 

At Guilford, she has made herself useful in ways that rarely draw attention. As an Ethical Leadership Fellow, service is stitched into the fabric of Z’s days. She sets up tables for groups, supports campus programs and steps in where help is needed. Last semester, she helped organize and lead a public panel discussion following a screening of the movie Sinners, examining “the feminist undertones,” its relationship to Black culture, and its emphasis on “spirituality and music.”
 

This is not résumé-building, at least not as Z sees it. It is continuity.
 

“Just being there for others – that’s just kind of always been the goal,” she says, as if surprised that anyone would expect a more elaborate explanation.
 

That servant’s heart reaches back to her teenage years growing up in the tiny community of Laytonsville, Md. In high school, Z volunteered as a firefighter and EMT, starting at 16. Most of her time was spent in ambulances helping transporting patients, taking vitals, occupying that liminal space where fear, pain, and trust converge.
 

“Some of it was the community of it all,” she says. “Some of it was just … being there in the weird space of people’s lives and helping them feel their way through it.
 

“It’s hard to articulate everything,” she says. “I think it’s the right thing to do.”
 

Z is majoring in Religious Studies with a minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Divinity school is on the horizon, and beyond that, a future that likely includes ministry. Not as performance or proclamation, but as presence.
 

“As a religious person,” she says, “Being there for others is one of the purest forms of religiosity.”
 

Dr. King’s influence on her thinking is not symbolic. It is practical.
 

“MLK is a model for what I want to be in terms of, like, my own vocation,” she says. “Being able to break it down to the most basic level and friendship and … being able to unite emotion.”
 

That conviction was reinforced last summer while working in North Carolina on disaster repair and relief projects for families displaced by Hurricane Helene.
 

“More than anything,” she says, “the things that touched those people, that has helped them move forward is community.”
 

She returns to the idea with insistence, not sentimentality.
 

“If you don’t invest in (community),” she says, “it’s not going to happen.”
 

Z resists the language of sainthood that sometimes follows service-oriented people. She bristles at being called selfless or servant-hearted.
 

“It’s a hard thing for me to claim,” she says. “I feel like I’m not a good enough person to describe that way. I don’t walk on water.”
 

What she does is show up — again and again. She likes the shape of her life, she says: the work she gets to do, the things she cares about, even “all of the annoying things that I do.”
 

The recognition Thursday night still feels abstract. What matters more is the idea that someone noticed, in her daily acts, a reflection of something larger.
 

“The idea that someone thought of me and is celebrating maybe not me but the work I’m doing and that others are doing, that’s what makes this special. Because then maybe others will do the same.”
When that happens, says Z, community grows.