EcoHubs is a growing network of people building regenerative intentional communities: places that give back more than they take, stay rooted in nature, deal with conflict openly, and are designed so belonging doesn't depend on luck.
Our camp at The Gathering México. Five days in the Mayan jungle: choose a vision and a piece of land, lay out the village, write down how you decide and how you repair — then see the network it belongs to. No land, no capital, no plan needed.
EcoHubs grew out of many people, in different corners of the world, who quietly felt the same things. Read their stories.
Growing up in Germany, I felt alien. Lonely. I didn't understand why then—but the feeling was strong, and I listened to it instead of suppressing it.
For a long time I thought something was wrong with me. Eventually another thought arrived: maybe it isn't me. Maybe it's the way we live.
So I left. I traveled for many years, and for the first time I had space to actually hear myself. I connected to nature. I connected to other people who also felt alien in their previous lives.
And for the first time — I didn't feel lonely. I felt connected to myself. I felt alive.
"I learned so much about different ways of living — permaculture, alternative education, meaningful work, new ways of making decisions. Alternatives that actually work, that are a lot better. And I kept asking: why don't we use them?
I had endless ideas for applying these alternatives inside the big system we live in. Over time I learned it's almost impossible. The system is too rigid. Too big to bend.
This is where I think most institutions fail when they try to make an impact. They put band-aids on wounds. They don't heal the wound — because the system doesn't allow the wound to be healed.
So I changed my question. Not how do I fix this system?, but how do I build a new way of life inside it? That's when I found my answer in intentional communities — small, place-based groups already living many of the alternatives I'd spent years studying.
That's how EcoHubs began. Not as a product. As a direction.
Intentional communities held everything I was looking for — and yet some sources claim that 80–90% of them fail. Not because the vision is wrong. Because we were never taught how to live this close together — how to make decisions, resolve conflict, make the invisible things explicit.
So I wrote the guidebook I wished someone had handed me. It is not an ideology. It is a handful of patterns that say: make this explicit. Talk about this before it breaks. This is what's usually left unsaid. We call it the RCOS Standard.
— Stefan
Most of what we live with was designed for output, growth and scale rather than for people. These are some of the wounds it leaves.
We live next to neighbors we never meet and spend hours scrolling instead of sharing one meal.
Extractive agriculture strips the soil for this year's profit and leaves less for every year after. The math stopped working a while ago.
Power concentrates at the top. Towns lose their shops, their culture, their self-sufficiency. Energy is burned just to ship our food around the world.
Most work is abstract and far from home. You never see who it served. A lifetime of effort and still the question: what was all that for?
4 more below, and even those aren't all of them.
The system does not provide —
nature does.
Power is a human construct.
It only works as long as we consent to it.
We are not waiting for permission from a system that cannot heal itself. We are quietly building a different way of life inside it — one that needs it less, and less, and less.
Community isn't a cure. But most of our pain comes from living at a scale humans were never built for. Bring the scale back down to one place and people you know by name, and the knots start to loosen.
In a small place, you are seen. You are missed when you are gone.
When the person you serve is across the table instead of across the planet, work stops being a shift you survive. You see who it was for.
Permaculture, regenerative agriculture, local food. Soil gets built up instead of mined, and water is managed by reading how it moves across the land.
Small businesses serve the people around them, so less depends on fragile global supply chains, less gets shipped, and more value stays where it's made.
6 more shifts below.
A single EcoHub shelters the people who live there. We are building a network of small, locally rooted communities that share what they learn and back each other up.
We don't plan a revolution. Community by community, we are reducing how much we depend on the system, until a different way of life becomes normal, accessible, and replicable.
Rooted in a place, adapted to its culture and climate.
Sharing patterns, failures, and tools through the RCOS Standard.
Each hub forks the model and adapts it, so every hub stays its own place.
EcoHub One will be a regenerative community designed so the people and the land both thrive. It starts with a small founding circle, and the first step is saying you're in.
Five strands of work are underway now, without waiting for funding. Each one feeds the others, and we document each one as we go.
We are the first test of the Standard. Our own membership, governance, conflict and decision pathways are written down, we live by them, and we revise them as the community grows.
Read our RCOS specs ↗In Ecuador, an existing community has been applying the RCOS Standard since March 2026, under real ecological, social and economic constraints. What they learn goes straight back into the Standard.
See the pilot →We read the literature, talk to elders of past projects, and document the failure patterns that keep coming back. The RCOS Standard has to hold up against every one of them.
Open the research →We are designing patterns, tools and onboarding paths that lower the bar to entry, let a community adopt one piece at a time, and make resilience the default, so intentional community stops being rare.
See where we need help →Weekly calls, member onboarding, partner conversations, public events. The network gets stronger every time someone shows up.
Become a member →All five strands are open. Pick the one that matches your craft.
An EcoHub is a small, place-based community where people live, work, and learn together while regenerating the land they depend on, and it connects to a wider network of hubs doing the same.
It is meant as a working model for belonging, tested in real conditions and shared openly so others don't have to start from zero.
The RCOS Standard (Regenerative Community Operating System) is an open standard for designing and operating regenerative communities. Despite the name, it is a written document rather than software. It gives communities a shared way to make their structure explicit, testable, and improvable.
It's the first tangible outcome of EcoHubs, the part of the vision you can already use. Anyone can read it, fork it, and put it to work today.
A walk-through of what RCOS is, why it exists, and how the layers fit together.
Open it on the RCOS Standard page →Each circle is a real member giving their craft, their voice, their time. The bigger the circle, the more they have contributed so far. Click any one to read their story.
Organisations and networks doing related work, who share what they've learned with us and with each other.
People sometimes ask: how can you use AI and digital platforms while building something regenerative? It's a fair question. We use technology where it lets one person do the work of ten, where it bridges distance, and where it lets a community remember what it said.
We don't use it to manufacture engagement, replace relationships, or grow at any cost.
AI is being shaped, right now, by people who use it to concentrate attention, capital, and decisions in fewer and fewer hands. If those of us building something different sit this out, the future gets written without us. We pick up the same tools, deliberately, while there is still time to point them somewhere else.
Yes, AI costs energy and water, and we don't pretend otherwise. We treat it as an upfront investment, the way you build soil. Compute spent now to design regenerative systems returns many times over: in trips not taken, in food grown closer to home, in mistakes a hundred communities don't have to make twice.
A tool is as good or bad as the metric it is tuned for. Extractive AI is tuned for profit per resource: more clicks, more attention, more dollars wrung from the same earth. We point the same engines at life per resource.
Extraction is digital, fast, and well-funded. Regeneration is too often analog and slow, and it has been losing ground for decades. To rebuild on the same scale we have been losing on, we have to work at that pace.
People who knew early that the default life wasn't the only life, and have been searching since.
Organizers and founders who've seen well-meaning projects collapse, and want to understand why.
Permaculturists, farmers and stewards who know the soil is ready and the humans are the harder part.
Designers, developers, facilitators who want their craft to land somewhere that actually matters.
People whose work feels abstract, far from home, and who want it to feed the people they live near.
Which is, honestly, a lot of us. That's enough of a reason to show up.
If one of those sounds like you, we'd love to meet you.
Become a member →Application is free · we read every one
The first 150 aligned members, who shape the foundation of the RCOS Standard with us.
Open-source and revised as practice teaches us more, across ecology, governance, economy, culture, and care.
Apply the RCOS Standard in real communities, starting in Ecuador, and publish every scar and every win.
RCOS gets better with every person who reads it carefully, disagrees with a chapter, runs an experiment, or comes back with what they learned. There are several ways in.
Already part of (or starting) a local community? Try an RCOS chapter on the ground. We help you adapt it; you bring back what you learn.
Tell us about it →Permaculture, governance, facilitation, code, listening, storytelling. We need every one of these.
See where we need help →For organisations, foundations, communities and projects doing related work. We co-design, fund pilots, and share what we learn.
Start a conversation →None of these are tiers, and none of them cost anything. They are the doorways we have seen people walk through.
We're looking for people ready to make the invisible things explicit, in their own lives and with others.
Non-speculative · Non-ideological · Built in the open
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