Community and Learning Place
The combination of living community and educational centre makes ZEGG a special place. In the midst of our social and ecological model project, living and learning are interwoven.
Our educational programmes impart lived knowledge and offer experiential spaces that combine self-responsibility, touchability and open communication. In this way, we promote social change - towards more awareness, cooperation and sustainability. Our seminars focus on topics such as communication and social competence, art and ecology, love and relationships and community building.
ZEGG gGmbH is owned by ZEGG Trägerverein e.V. and run by the ZEGG community. For over 30 years, the ZEGG community has been developing a way of life based on love - among people, with nature and the greater whole. More than 100 people bring the education centre together and shape a sustainable living space. With ZEGG as a place to live and learn, they put cooperative and creative living into practice.
ZEGG was founded in 1991 as a "research and seminar place for a non-violent earth". 13 years of intensive community life in the "Bauhütte" were the preparation for this. In the social experiment led by Dieter Duhm, foundations were laid for a new culture. To develop this further, the community bought the ZEGG site in 1991 and moved there. Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels and half of the ZEGG residents at the time created Tamera in Portugal in 1995. Over the years, important new influences, inspirations and residents came to ZEGG.
Core ideas
We understand ZEGG as a cultural laboratory. Living in community serves us as a laboratory in which the foundations of an authentic, sustainable and cooperative culture are developed and lived. Transformational community is our path, not the goal.
Vision & Mission
We humans live consciously, lovingly and freely as a responsible part of creation.
Our mission is deep social change towards a sustainable, holistic and sex-positive culture.
In community we explore personal and cultural conditions for trust, love and cooperation. This is the basis for our educational work. It offers protected and experimental spaces for living learning, transformational processes and consciousness development.
Our values
ZEGG is committed to a cultural change in society. This requires awareness and paradigm shifts in almost all areas of human life.
We are guided by seven guiding values:
1. Love
Love is our highest value. It connects us with all people in the world and with all of creation. As universal love, it can embrace everything, accept, forgive and integrate what has gone before. And it makes us strive for "higher things", for the good of the whole and for more clarity and light in the world. In community we learn to choose love again and again. Love reduces separation and fears. For us, erotic love belongs to a life-affirming culture alongside self-love and love of neighbour.
2. Spiritual Consciousness
Consciousness is our true nature. For us, spiritual consciousness means understanding ourselves and others as part of a higher order, a greater whole. We are more than the body-mind-feelings complex.
Meditation practice and transformation of individual and collective shadow parts enable deeper awareness.
Feedback culture, forum and mindfulness in everyday life are important tools among us to uncover ego structures and find compassionate presence.
3. Responsibility for the future of life
We face our responsibility for the future of life. It is about ecology and sustainability for the next generations.
We work to promote life in a deeply understood sense of Earth Care - People Care - Fair Share. In cooperation with others, we implement creative, proven and effective solutions for the challenges of the present.
4. Community
Community is a flexible vessel for trust and care throughout the arc of life. We foster social interaction and feedback to promote potential development and human growth.
In this process, the abilities of individuals can unfold as well as collective intelligence and synergy. We make relevant decisions together. Living and loving communally is the starting point for experimentation, spiritual growth, effectiveness and for networking within the global community.
5. Experimentation
ZEGG, the Centre for Experimental Social Design, sees itself as a transformatory. Experimentation fertilises all areas of our lives and enables the development of consciousness at all levels. This includes embedding and reflection, alignment with direction or core values, flow back into the community, integration and sharing with the world.
For experimentation, we are willing to take risks, accept mistakes and break open our everyday life. Experimentation is about creating aliveness, awareness and social warmth.
6. Effectiveness
Effectiveness for us means creating meaningful and effective impulses for more love, awareness and sustainability. It is important to us that our values guide our actions and gain strength in ZEGG and beyond.
As a community we develop personal and cultural conditions for trust and cooperation. This is the basis for our educational and counselling services and other projects with which we contribute to changing values. We cooperate with people, initiatives, communities and companies locally and in the world.
7. Wealth
Our seventh guiding value is the promotion of wealth for the benefit of all. Wealth is an expression of abundance and freedom and encompasses the material, the intellectual and the spiritual. We look back proudly and gratefully on decades of communal experience.
We have created an unusual, beautiful, ecological place and continue to develop it. We are rich in competence, deep consciousness and material resources. Through this wealth we can give effectively, receive further wealth in return and contribute to a more loving world.
Organizational culture
We value a lively, creative and innovative work process. To support this in decision-making and organisation, we have been using sociocratic methods since 2009. They combine the advantages of democratic systems with those of hierarchical organisations: High motivation and participation meets efficiency and expanded capacity to act.
To support our learning curve and let it thrive, we launched an organisational development circle in 2017.
Organisation
The Education Centre is based on circles that manage their work areas autonomously. This means that all important decisions are made there, where people with the relevant competence and capacity to act come together.
Decisions
Decisions are made by consensus. In forming opinions on fundamental issues, every voice counts and all concerns must be integrated. Through this process, the best possible solution emerges in a process that supports vibrancy and diversity.