Community Organizing Fellowship Application

Build Power in Your Community with This Fellowship Application Form

Community organizing is the foundation of lasting social change. Whether you're mobilizing neighbors around housing justice, building coalitions for environmental action, or developing grassroots leadership in underserved communities, finding and training the next generation of organizers is critical to movement success.

This Community Organizing Fellowship Application template is designed for nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, labor unions, and social justice movements that need a comprehensive way to identify, vet, and select fellows who will become tomorrow's community leaders.

Why Paperform is Perfect for Fellowship Applications

Traditional application processes often involve scattered PDFs, email chains, and endless spreadsheets. Paperform brings everything into one streamlined, professional experience that reflects the values of your organization while making it easier to identify the strongest candidates.

Built for mission-driven organizations, this template captures the depth and nuance you need—advocacy experience, campaign examples, issue area expertise, base-building skills, and leadership goals—all in one beautifully designed form that respects applicants' time and tells your program's story.

With conditional logic, you can tailor follow-up questions based on an applicant's experience level, issue area focus, or geographic location. The doc-style editor lets you weave in your fellowship's mission, testimonials from past fellows, and images from your organizing work to create an application that inspires as much as it evaluates.

How Organizing Programs Use This Template

Community organizing fellowships typically seek candidates with a mix of lived experience, organizing skills, political analysis, and commitment to long-term movement building. This template helps you assess:

• Advocacy and organizing experience: Past campaigns, roles, tactics used, and measurable outcomes
• Base-building and relational organizing skills: Experience with 1-on-1 conversations, community mapping, leadership identification, and coalition work
• Issue area expertise: Focus areas like housing justice, worker rights, climate action, racial equity, immigration, education, healthcare, or economic justice
• Campaign strategy thinking: Concrete examples of theory of change, power analysis, targets, tactics, and victories
• Leadership development goals: What fellows hope to learn, how they'll contribute to the cohort, and their vision for long-term organizing work

Whether you're running a 6-month intensive, a year-long fellowship, or a multi-year leadership development program, this template adapts to your timeline and program model.

Automate Your Selection Process with Stepper

Fellowship selection involves multiple stakeholders—program directors, current organizers, community advisors, and sometimes alumni. Stepper (stepper.io), Paperform's AI-native workflow builder, can turn each application into a structured review process:

• Route applications to different reviewers based on issue area or geographic region
• Create scoring rubrics that aggregate ratings from multiple evaluators
• Send personalized interview invitations to top candidates
• Trigger automatic updates to your applicant tracking system or Airtable base
• Keep your team in sync via Slack or email notifications at each stage

This means less time managing logistics and more time having meaningful conversations with potential fellows.

Who This Template Is For

This Community Organizing Fellowship Application is ideal for:

• Grassroots nonprofits and advocacy organizations building leadership pipelines in their communities
• Labor unions developing the next generation of shop stewards, organizers, and worker leaders
• Social justice movements running cohort-based training programs
• Community foundations funding organizing fellowships and needing a standardized application
• Faith-based organizing networks identifying and training congregation-based leaders
• Environmental justice groups developing organizers in frontline communities
• Tenant unions and housing justice organizations building renter power
• Immigrant rights groups training community navigators and organizers

Designed with Organizers in Mind

The form opens with a compelling introduction to your fellowship's mission and vision, then guides applicants through sections covering personal background, organizing experience, skills assessment, campaign examples, issue area focus, and leadership goals.

Conditional logic ensures that applicants who are newer to organizing aren't intimidated by questions about complex campaign strategy, while experienced organizers have space to showcase their depth. You can ask about availability, language skills, accessibility needs, and references—all in one professional, mobile-friendly experience.

Integration-Ready for Your Organizing Stack

Community organizing teams often use a mix of tools—CRMs like NationBuilder or EveryAction, project management in Airtable or Notion, communication via Slack or Signal, and donor management in Bloomerang or Little Green Light.

Paperform integrates seamlessly with 30+ tools and can connect to thousands more via Stepper, Zapier, or webhooks. Send applications directly to your CRM, log them in Google Sheets for committee review, or trigger Slack notifications when a particularly strong candidate applies.

All responses are SOC 2 Type II compliant and can be stored according to your data residency requirements—critical for organizations handling sensitive community information.

Build the Movement You Want to See

Strong organizing starts with strong organizers. This fellowship application template helps you find people who share your values, bring diverse skills and perspectives, and are committed to the long-term work of building community power.

Customize every question to reflect your theory of change, your issue focus, and your fellowship model. Add video testimonials from alumni, embed photos from past actions, and use your brand colors and fonts to create an application experience that embodies your organizational culture.

With Paperform, you're not just collecting applications—you're inviting the next generation of leaders into your movement.