If our legal structure provides the protective bark and deep roots of our home, then our governance is the lifeblood that flows through the tree—the dynamic way we breathe, decide, and grow together.

At the heart of our community is the General Assembly of our House Verein, the source of our collective authority, represented by the Core Plenum throughout the year. This power flows into the Open Plenum, our central gathering space where we stay synchronized and combine our energy with our Onboarding Members, Residents, Guests, and Visitors. From there, it branches out into a diverse network of specialized working groups.

To sustain our daily rhythm and essential infrastructure, we rely on four core “backbone” groups that ensure our basic needs are met with consistency and care:

• Building: Tending to our physical shelters.
• Maintenance: Heating, water, buildings, the land.
• Finance: Stewardship of our shared resources.
• Food Order: Managing our communal nourishment.
• GRAG (Guest and Residents AG): Welcoming new life and nurturing our hospitality.

Beyond these pillars, our community is a mosaic of five other active working groups that we intentionally sustain, as they cover essential areas of our daily functioning. Ten altogether—we have had more, and we have had fewer—these are the ones currently in place.

On top of that, we have around ten active project groups with more focused scopes—either as part of working groups or standing alone.

In our experience, most of them emerge and dissolve naturally—rising when a specific need is “alive” and falling away once their purpose is fulfilled. This fluidity allows us to stay responsive to the needs of the land and the people at any given moment.

We celebrate individual initiatives as well, yet by default, we encourage everyone to join working and project groups, focusing our energy on collective efforts to reach our goals together.

Evolving Toward Distributed Power

While the Plenum remains the ultimate anchor of our collective responsibility, we are intentionally evolving toward a sociocratic structure. We are learning to trust the wisdom of our branches by distributing power to our working groups, gradually giving them clear “domains” and well-defined roles to act with purpose.

In our experience, every step we take toward this intentional distribution of responsibility makes our daily lives smoother. We cherish our meetings as vital rhythms of connection and shared alignment, yet we believe that distributing power allows them to remain nourishing rather than exhausting. This balance allows us to step back into our collective power, reclaiming our energy for what truly matters: our relationships, our children, and the vibrant environment we share.