Can Zakat be spent in a collective way?

For instance, say that a community wants to tend to people who would be wayfarers, such as typically young students who often need hostels, who tend to not have access to that many resources even back home, let alone on the road, often going for educational or other benevolent purposes. Would spending some of the zakat money meant for wayfarers on a project like this to build a hostel and maintain it be a good use of zakat? Or a similar idea, if someone wanted to make a program similar to Medicaid, used by lower class people for medical access, would zakat money spent on the entire program as opposed to individually funding a poor person's medical bills be a good thing, intending to use advantages of a collective program like economies of scale and the strength of centralized negotiation with suppliers in procurement?