Collective Care Grant Application

Build Stronger Communities with Collective Care Grant Applications

Finding funding for community health initiatives shouldn't mean wrestling with rigid, inaccessible forms. Whether you're building neighborhood wellness networks, establishing healing justice practices, or creating disability justice programming, this Collective Care Grant Application template helps you gather the information funders need while honoring the values of accessibility, community power, and collective liberation.

Why Paperform for Collective Care Grant Applications?

Traditional grant applications often replicate the same barriers that collective care work seeks to dismantle. Paperform gives you the flexibility to create application forms that reflect your values—accessible, beautiful, and built to center the voices of those closest to the work.

Design applications that match your mission. Your grant application can look and feel like an extension of your organization's identity. Add images that reflect your community, choose fonts and colors that honor your cultural context, and write in language that resonates with applicants rather than corporate jargon. The doc-style editor lets you weave context, encouragement, and clear instructions throughout the form.

Make accessibility a foundation, not an afterthought. Collective care work centers disability justice—and your application form should too. Paperform's clean semantic structure works with screen readers, you can provide ample space for detailed responses, and conditional logic means applicants only see questions relevant to their specific project type. No one should have to navigate irrelevant sections or confusing pathways.

Capture the nuance of community-led work. Collective care initiatives don't fit neatly into conventional categories. Use matrix questions to understand partnership ecosystems, file upload fields for letters of community support, and open-ended questions that invite storytelling rather than corporate speak. This template recognizes that healing justice practices, mutual aid networks, and disability justice integration require space to explain context, relationships, and lived expertise.

Streamline your review process with Stepper. Once applications come in, Stepper can automatically route them to different review committees based on focus area, send acknowledgment emails with next steps, add submissions to your grants management system, and create tasks for follow-up conversations—all without your team touching a spreadsheet.

Handle multi-stage processes seamlessly. Many grant cycles include initial applications, invited full proposals, and reporting requirements. With Paperform, you can create a family of connected forms that applicants can access through unique links, and use pre-filling to carry information forward so applicants don't have to re-enter basic details at each stage.

Who This Template Serves

This collective care grant application is designed for:

• Community foundations and health equity funders supporting grassroots wellness initiatives
• Mutual aid networks and solidarity funds redistributing resources to member-led projects
• Health justice organizations funding community health worker programs and peer support models
• Disability justice funds centering the leadership of disabled people in health and healing work
• Neighborhood associations and community land trusts investing in local wellness infrastructure
• Public health departments partnering with communities through participatory grantmaking

What Makes Collective Care Funding Different

Unlike traditional health grants that fund institutions, collective care grants recognize that healing happens in relationship and that communities hold expertise about their own needs. This template helps you gather information about:

Community governance and accountability: How are decisions made? Who holds leadership? How does the project stay accountable to those most impacted?

Healing justice approaches: What practices, traditions, or modalities does the work draw from? How does it address root causes rather than just symptoms?

Disability justice integration: How does the work center disabled community members' leadership and lived experience? What access needs are built into the project design?

Solidarity and relationship building: What partnerships, coalitions, or networks does the project strengthen? How does it connect to broader movements?

Resource sharing and sustainability: Beyond this grant, how does the project model mutual support and collective resourcing?

Automate Without Losing the Human Touch

Paperform's payment features aren't just for selling products—you can also use them to process application fees with built-in fee waiver options, ensuring cost is never a barrier to applying. Set up conditional logic so that applicants indicating financial hardship can request a waiver with one click.

Connect your application form to your existing tools: send submissions to Airtable for collaborative review, notify your Slack channel when high-priority applications come in, or sync with your CRM to track applicant relationships over time. The forms work the way your team works.

Security and Trust for Sensitive Information

Grant applications often include confidential information about community vulnerabilities, organizational finances, and personal stories. Paperform is SOC 2 Type II compliant and GDPR-ready, with encryption, data residency controls, and role-based permissions so you can protect applicant information while giving review committees the access they need.

Start Funding Collective Care

With Paperform's Collective Care Grant Application template, you can move beyond extractive application processes toward ones that honor community wisdom, center accessibility, and resource the healing work our communities need. Customize the questions to match your funding priorities, add your own evaluation criteria, and start receiving applications that tell the whole story of collective care in action.

Whether you're redistributing $1,000 micro-grants or managing a multi-year funding initiative, this template gives you a foundation to build on—one that's as flexible, accessible, and community-centered as the work you're supporting.