Community Wealth Building Grant Application

Build Thriving Local Economies with Community Wealth Building Grants

Community wealth building is transforming how cities and regions approach economic development—shifting from attracting outside investment to growing prosperity from within. If you're managing a grant program focused on anchor institution procurement, employee ownership conversions, local investment strategies, or economic inclusion metrics, you need an application process that captures the depth and nuance of these initiatives.

This Community Wealth Building Grant Application template is designed for foundations, government agencies, economic development corporations, and community wealth organizations administering funding for transformative local economic programs. Built with Paperform, it helps you collect detailed project proposals, assess community impact potential, and evaluate applicants against economic inclusion criteria—all through one professional, on-brand form.

Why Community Wealth Building Matters

Traditional economic development often extracts wealth from communities, funneling profits to distant shareholders and headquarters. Community wealth building flips this model, anchoring capital and ownership locally through strategies like:

• Anchor institution procurement that redirects purchasing power to local, minority-owned, and cooperative businesses
• Employee ownership conversions that transfer business assets to workers through ESOPs, cooperatives, and ownership trusts
• Local investment funds that deploy patient capital into community enterprises and affordable housing
• Economic inclusion initiatives that measure and advance equity across race, gender, and income lines

Grant programs supporting these strategies need application forms that go beyond generic project descriptions—they need to understand supply chain transformation, ownership transition roadmaps, capital structures, and measurable inclusion outcomes.

What This Grant Application Template Captures

This template is structured to collect comprehensive information across all major community wealth building strategies:

Organization and Eligibility sections verify applicant type (nonprofit, cooperative, CDFI, anchor institution, municipal agency) and confirm alignment with community wealth principles. You'll gather essential details about organizational capacity, governance structure, and community accountability.

Project Overview fields capture your applicants' theory of change, whether they're launching a procurement shift at a hospital system, converting a manufacturing business to employee ownership, establishing a community investment fund, or implementing economic inclusion targets across multiple strategies.

Anchor Institution Procurement questions (shown conditionally) dive into current spending patterns, local supplier development plans, diverse vendor targets, and supply chain capacity building. This section is critical for universities, hospitals, and municipal governments redirecting billions in purchasing power.

Employee Ownership Conversion fields collect details about business valuation, ownership transition models (ESOP, worker cooperative, employee ownership trust), worker readiness, financing structure, and post-conversion governance plans.

Local Investment Fund questions assess fund structure, capitalization strategy, investment thesis, target sectors, community return expectations, and deployment timelines—essential for CDFIs, community foundations, and place-based investment initiatives.

Economic Inclusion Metrics allow applicants to define measurable outcomes: job creation by demographic, wage levels, wealth accumulation targets, minority business participation, and equity gap reduction goals.

Budget and Sustainability sections ensure financial viability, capturing grant amount requested, total project budget, matching funds, revenue models, and long-term sustainability plans beyond the grant period.

Perfect for Grant Administrators and Economic Development Leaders

This template serves foundations and agencies running community wealth building programs, community development financial institutions (CDFIs) deploying impact capital, anchor institutions launching procurement transformation initiatives, employee ownership centers supporting business conversions, and economic development organizations implementing place-based wealth strategies.

Whether you're a grants manager at a community foundation, economic development director at a municipal agency, program officer focused on inclusive economies, or nonprofit director administering wealth building funds, this form adapts to your specific program priorities and evaluation criteria.

Built on Paperform: Professional Applications Without Developer Support

Paperform's document-style editor makes it simple to customize this template for your program's unique requirements. Add your foundation's branding, adjust questions to reflect your funding priorities, insert your economic inclusion framework, and embed video explaining your community wealth approach—all without touching code.

Conditional logic reveals relevant sections based on project type, so applicants focused on employee ownership don't wade through irrelevant anchor procurement questions. Calculation fields can validate budget totals and cost per job created. File upload fields collect required attachments like letters of support, financial statements, and ownership transition feasibility studies.

Once applications arrive, Paperform's AI Insights can analyze responses across your applicant pool, surfacing common themes in community impact strategies, identifying high-potential projects, and summarizing economic inclusion approaches—saving your review committee hours of manual analysis.

Automate Your Grant Workflow with Stepper

Community wealth building grants involve multi-stage review, committee scoring, site visits, and compliance monitoring. Connect this form to Stepper to automate your entire grant lifecycle: route applications to review committees based on focus area, trigger scoring rubrics and feedback requests, send conditional approval notifications, schedule site visits and technical assistance, and push funded projects into monitoring dashboards.

Stepper keeps your team, review committees, and grantees aligned through complex, multi-month processes—no more lost applications, unclear approval status, or manual spreadsheet tracking.

Support Economic Equity and Local Ownership

From Everett, Washington to Preston, England, communities are using wealth building strategies to reverse decades of extraction and inequality. Your grant program can accelerate this movement by funding anchor institution partnerships, worker ownership transitions, community investment vehicles, and measurable inclusion outcomes.

This template helps you identify the most promising initiatives, assess readiness and impact potential, and build a portfolio of projects that genuinely shift who owns, controls, and benefits from the local economy. Start with Paperform's professional, flexible platform—then customize every detail to match your community wealth vision and funding priorities.

Get started today and build a grant application process that reflects the transformative potential of community wealth building.