A trade association, also known as an industry trade group, business association, sector association or industry body, is an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry.

An industry trade association participates in public relations activities such as advertising, education, political donations, lobbying and publishing, but its focus is collaboration between companies.

Associations may offer other services, such as producing conferences, networking or charitable events or offering classes or educational materials.

Many associations are non-profit organizations governed by bylaws and directed by officers who are also members.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is the organization that represents the interests of over 900 electric cooperatives in the United States, to various legislatures.

Independent electric utilities are not-for-profit and are owned by their members.

The Association, which was founded in 1942, unites the country's generation, transmission and distribution cooperatives which are found in 47 states and serve over 40 million people.

It is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

A business model is an "abstract representation of a business, be it conceptual, textual, and/or graphical, of all core interrelated architectural, co-operational, and financial arrangements designed and developed by an organization presently and in the future, as well as all core products and/or services the organization offers, or will offer, based on these arrangements that are needed to achieve its strategic goals and objectives." This definition by Al-Debei, El-Haddadeh and Avison (2008) indicates that value proposition, value architecture (the organizational infrastructure and technological architecture that allows the movement of products, services, and information), value finance (modeling information related to total cost of ownership, pricing methods, and revenue structure), and value network articulate the primary constructs or dimensions of business models.

An organization or organisation is an entity comprising multiple people, such as an institution or an association, that has a collective goal and is linked to an external environment.

A community is a small or large social unit (a group of people) who have something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity.

Often - but not always - communities share a sense of place that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood).

Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community.

People tend to define those social ties as important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions like family, home, work, government, society, or humanity, at large.

Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties (micro-level), "community" may also refer to large group affiliations (or macro-level), such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.