ZEGG: Intentional living

“Our idea is to live peacefully also with the planet with our resources and of course with human beings…that’s our vision.”

Ina Meyer-Stoll and Achim Ecker are long time members of the ZEGG community outside of Berlin in Germany. ZEGG is the largest intentional community in Germany with around 130 residents. Ecker says community members live in different types of houses, small and big with most people living in community households “each one of us has an individual room for themselves and then the rest we share, and we also have the meals together and cook together.”

Meyer-Stoll says there are many intentional communities in Germany with at least 10 or 12 with at least 100 residents along with many smaller communities. Meyer-Stoll says there are more and more intentional communities popping up around Europe.

Ecker is aware of some of the regulatory barriers to communal living that exist in the US, such as Boulder’s occupancy restriction. Ecker says no such barriers impede communal living in Germany “these barriers don’t exist….we don’t have these restrictions, we don’t have a legal form molded for community.”

ZEGG has also revolutionized a new form of communication called Transparency Integral Communication “on the outside it looks very simple, it’s a simple form of a circle and there are two people facilitating it, and two people who want to share what they’re dealing with…they go into the middle and share and in this process they’re guided a bit by the facilitators…the idea is to go deeper beyond my opinions, so I can find out what are my motives, what are my values.” Ecker says this has been an essential tool in the success of the ZEGG community and it has been adopted by many groups here in the US “it’s a method that kept us alive for all these years for more than 37 years.”