Age diversity
We live together with people of all ages (0 - 80 years) and have just integrated the first mentally handicapped person into our community.
35 children and about 85 adults live in Sieben Linden at the moment, with the number constantly growing. The children are all aged between 0 and 13 years, there is no youths as of yet. The youngest adult member of the community is 25 years old, with the main age group being people between 35 and 55 years.

Children
The children go to our forest kindergarden, which was founded very early in the history of the project and takes the children between 2 and 6 years outside into the woods and explores nature with them in all kinds of climates.
The school children go to 6 different schools in the region - while for many years all children went to the free school 25 km away from Sieben Linden, for the last 3 years the children and their parents also chose regular schools which are accessible with local buses and thus mean a lot less (time and money) effort for the parents.

Youths
The generation gap between 13 and 25 years is filled somewhat by a large group of volunteers that do a volunteer service for 12 months in Sieben Linden. 9 people doing the service plus about 4-6 more young people between 17 and 25 live with the community for a while, work in different areas, learn all kinds of new skills about communication and self-organisation in their communal life on their caravan site.

Elderly
There are quite a few people that chose to live in Sieben Linden at a high age. Some of them are parents of community members and live together in a house with others in a family with 3 generations. Others came on their own and are integrated in groups, or live on their own in a caravan, in close contact with the people living around them.
We aim to be integrative (for people that hear badly, for people that are not as mobile anymore,...) and to take good care of our elderly. As we have physiotherapists living here, we are - to a certain degree - able do this on a professional level, when someone is in special need. For the future we hope to set up really good elderly-friendly infrastructure in the houses we build and in the way we organise.

Dying
Of course dying is part of living in a community. 1,5 years ago the first person died in this community which was a really new experience for all of us in this setting. A few months ago our oldest member died after a long life.
We bury our dead on the nearby village cemetary. Here we are fortunately able to hold ceremonies that support us in our way of saying goodbye to loved ones.

Living together
The idea of community life in Sieben Linden is to be a “community of communities”. The big Ecovillage community is supposed to divide itself into smaller groups, so-called "neighborhoods", with their own concepts and way of life. This creates the space for people with completely different ideals to co-exist. Our common goal is to question our habits of consumption: challenging the world-wide exploitation of humans, animals and the environment. On top of what we as a community decided upon how we want to achieve this goal, neighbourhoods can find their own answers to this.
When a neighbourhood is founded (by at least 3 adult members of Sieben Linden), they can ask for a piece of land to live and build on.
At the moment, there are five neighbourhoods with different concepts.
The oldest is called “Club99”, has 6 members at the moment and they follow a radical concept trying to show that it is possible to live a simple fulfilled life that reduces ressource consumption by 90% (following a study that was made in the mid-nineties which claims that an inhabitant of Germany would have to reduce his ressource consumption by 90% for his lifestyle to be sustainable) on their piece of land. They are just in the process of finishing their second house which will be inhabited both by members and non-members of the neighbourhood. This house is a good example how we have to deal flexibly with our own ideas and concepts that we come up with.
One other neighbourhood basically got together because their children were roughly similar age and they wanted to move into a house quickly. So their neighbourhood was based on creating living space for the families and flat sharing communities for about 20 people.
A third neighbourhood consists of 8 people of which most live in a house together, and their main issues are healing and spirituality.
Then there is a group which is just in the process of finishing their house which will be home to 14 people. This neighbourhood has a close link to the public center of the village and is situated at the same time in the middle of the housing area. This is a symbol for their connectedness to the idea of the village and its promotion as well as to the community living here. They rather want to show ways of life that are not too far away from so-called average people and their lifestyles.
The fourth and biggest group with 17 people is living in a house that belongs to Sieben Linden but is situated in Poppau, the nearby village (1 km distance). This group is living with 3 generations in one big house that is slowly being renovated.
So far a bit more than half of the inhabitants of Sieben Linden live in a neighbourhood, the others are either living in smaller groups sharing flats or on their own, not associated to a group.

Communication
It is our aim to create a new culture together, an important part of which is how we communicate. We wish for everyone living in Sieben Linden to be in a "communication circle" of some sort, both for people to enhance their communication skills as for each person to be part of a social network.
As the first years of doing plenary together became more and more hard for everyone because personal conflicts and daily life issues were so often intermingled in discussions, it became clear that it is neccessary to seperate the the emotional issues from the facts that were to be decided upon in the plenary.
Due to this, we started to work with a method called "Forum" as early as in 1999. This method aims at transparency, openness and trust. It works in stable groups and uses parts of action theatre as well as gestalt therapy, although it is definitely not a substitution for therapy! But it helps to express feelings and thoughts in a safe space and to explore their origin. It also offers space for feedback by the group. This tool basically enables people to see each other with new eyes, for example in a conflict, without aiming at solving the conflict - it only wants to make it visible.
This method is used in some neighbourhoods, there is a forum for those that are not in a neighbourhood, and the whole community works with it when we do "intensive weeks" together.
Some people have been working with non-violent communication for many years, others are mediators and offer their knowledge to help in conflicts. There are many more different models of group interaction (supervision, talking stick, sharings, fish bowl, etc.).
All in all, we devote a lot of time to social processes in our community and slowly we reap the fruit of this ongoing work. There is a high level of awareness in communication with each other, a feedback that we often get by visitors, too.
To create enough room for emotional issues on a communal level, we started to do intensive weeks / weekends many years ago. Here as many people of Sieben Linden as have time meet to share how they are, sometimes about certain issues, sometimes

Decision making culture
The decision making model of Sieben Linden underwent several changes during the last 11 years. From consensus decision making in weekly plenaries about everything from new teapots to roads to be built, to monthly assemblies and an extended system of small groups and now to councils.
At the moment we have five councils that have relatively wide freedom of decision for the following areas: settlement co-operative, friends of the ecovillage association, food production, housing, social. All the other areas are either subgroups of the councils or little extra groups that do not decide on much on their own.
Additional to these councils we still meet in general assemblies once a month to discuss the big issues like who wants to be admitted to the community and where to put the next house.
The councils meet every two weeks, all meetings are open to everyone. Every second Tuesday evening all councils meet for half an hour to report to each other and the whole community what they are currently talking about and what decisions need to be made.
Decisions in the councils are to be made by consensus, in the assembly we have a majority vote but with an option to have a veto in case someone really cannot live with a decision that is to be made. In general we ask everyone to give inputs and to inform themselves before a decision is to be made and not in the moment of taking the decision.

Education
As a model settlement we offer a wide range of courses and also opportunities for groups to come.
Courses include Permaculture Design Courses, the Ecovillage Design Education (a four week course initiated by Gaia Education providing skills how to set up Ecovillages), Dragon Dreaming, straw bale building, plastering, different communication methods and healing approaches (massage, Shiatsu, systemic therapy,...), wild herbs, communication with horses, music (drumming, choir,...), and many more.
We regularly have school classes, university groups, groups of people doing a volunteer service, etc. here for day trips or whole weeks and offer tours and all kinds of practical experience or theoretical knowledge to them.
There are many opportunities to get to know Sieben Linden and its different aspects in so-called "building weeks", in internships, and in volunteer services for young people - so far there is the "Freiwilliges Oekologisches Jahr" which is a year long program in Germany for young people aged 16 to 26. We might start to offer places in EVS (European Volunteer Service), too - this will then be different time spans (2-12 months) and for people between 18 and 30 years.