The Friends of the Ecovillage Association (Freundeskreis Ökodorf e.V.)
This association was founded in 1991 as the first organisation to promote the idea of an Ecovillage. So one of its tasks is to take care of public relations. Part of this is informing the 250 members that live spread out all over germany of the development of the village through a quarterly print newsletter. In between we send out online newsletters that are also available in english language. The bigger part is writing articles for newspapers, sending out people to do talks, taking care of film teams and journalists, doing stalls and representing the Ecovillage of Sieben Linden at events.
Another important task is to open Sieben Linden as a center of knowledge, i.e. organising and offering seminars on a wide range of issues, e.g. ecological building, communication skills, healing, working with horses, raw food, permaculture, etc. as well as hosting groups, school classes, and others.
All members of the community are members of this association, too.

The Settlement Co-operative (Siedlungsgenossenschaft Ökodorf e.G.)
This co-operative was already founded in 1993 in order for the Ecovillage inhabitants to be common proprietors of the land and infrastructure of the village.
This organisation is at the top of the decision-making hierarchy. All adult inhabitants of Sieben Linden become member of the co-operative when permanently joining the community by signing shares. Currently, the cooperative has about 65 members (2009) who are participating in the development of the project with their own capital and labour.

Project Duration & Schedule:
We plan to build the infrastructure and housing for 250 to 300 people gradually over the next decades. As this is a question both of financing and of people taking responsibility, we do not have a schedule - after 11 years we created housing for about 80 people, so it might take us another 15 years till we have finished all the building work, depending on whether we build more houses of types that we already tested than sticking to do a prototype with each new house.
Parallel to this we will be busy creating more edible landscapes during the next years, which definitely needs more attention and offers a lot of space for development!


Project Needs
We set up this project as a learning space, for us and for others.
As we are still building houses for the next years and doing this is a lot of work, we welcome people to help us out on the build sites, in turning our monocultural forest into a broadleaf-diversity, in preserving the many fruit that we collect on our site and around, in the garden...
In exchange we offer the experience of living in a sustainable project that has many different features and aspects. Most people that come here leave inspired and impressed - be it for the holistic approach with such an emphasis on ecology, for being part of a different way of living together or for other things - and with the wish to come back.
We also welcome our guests to offer what they want to share (yoga, singing together, travel experiences, cultural backgrounds,...).
And: we definitely need money to build houses and in this very moment (beginning of 2009) we are looking for sponsors for the seminar center we are planning to start next year!