When integrated effectively, community engagement principles can enhance capacity and broaden impacts for community-engaged scholars seeking and writing grants. Viewed through the lens of a participatory framework that emphasizes the importance of mutual recognition, humility, and relationship-building in community-driven work, a grant development process that advocates for early and intentional community partner engagement, highlighting the benefits of cocreating solutions and building trust, begins to address concerns of historically extractive research and resulting mistrust toward higher education institutions, particularly among vulnerable communities. Although this approach requires greater intentionality, time, and even systemic changes at the institutional level, the authors propose that community-engaged grant writing can be ethical, beneficial, and conducive to genuine community impact, challenging traditional academic structures and promoting collaborative, reciprocal relationships between scholars, practitioners, and community partners.