• Active Citizenship: Active Citizenship involves active participation by people in their communities and civil society generally. It is not just about voting in elections. One suggested outcome of Active Citizenship is that individuals can help to create a better society by directly contributing to their communities. The suggestion is that by doing this they can also help to define the problems they face and tackle together, with support from government and public bodies.

• Civic Engagement: Collective and/or individual action that occurs in a variety of ways (volunteering; supporting community projects; involvement in a CV organisation; voting etc) and aims to address issues of public concern.

• Civil Society: Civil Society consists of informal and formal networks, groups and organisations which act independently of the market and state. A range of formations outside the public and private sectors make up civil society and include community groups, voluntary organisations, charities, NGO’s and trade unions.

• Community: Traditionally defined by geography but has evolved to also represent groups of people with common interests or a set of concerns (resolving social issues, promoting advocacy, lobbying for improvement in health and public welfare issues).

• Participation: Being actively involved in something.

• Infrastructure: A useful definition for infrastructure is that used by The Taskforce Working Group on Infrastructure in Northern Ireland as cited by NICVA in its Policy Manifesto (2003: p9) “Infrastructure can be defined as any organisation playing a supporting, co-ordinating or development role in relation to voluntary and community organisations at regional, sub regional or local level”.