About Us

My Social City Bern is the first page of the Social City project developed by ZESS Zimmermann Education and Socialising Services, located in Bern. The following section is going to inform you about our vision, mission, values, and strategy.

Our vision:

We build bridges between people to foster the social side of urban life.

Our mission is to give people the keys to an enriching social life by efficiently teaching communication skills, providing the adequate information for a successful integration into new social environments as well as by offering opportunities for interaction and new friendship. ZESS is committed to 

• Quality: We are dedicated to provide adequate, efficient, flexible, and customer-oriented services which best fit our customers' individual needs.
• Social responsibility: We believe that business should not only bring financial rewards but contribute to social progress and as such we orient our business activities towards fields where they can have positive effects for society.
• Integrity: We demonstrate honesty, fairness, and transparency in our actions.
• Accountability: We accept our responsibilities and we meet our commitments. We take responsibility for our performance in all of our decisions and actions.
• Respect: We honour the rights and beliefs of all our stakeholders, especially of our clients and of our staff members - as long as they are not racist, sexist, or in any other form defaming other social groups or individuals. We treat others with the highest degree of dignity, equality, and trust.
• Teamwork: We are working as a team, we support each other, and we are committed to an open working environment where every associate is a valued member, recognized for his inputs and rewarded for his/her efforts.

Founded on September 1^st 2010, ZESS is a small and young enterprise. This is why ZESS can serve its clients in the most dynamic and flexible way to meet individual needs. In order to maintain this flexibility, we aim to keep our structures as lean as possible: E.g. for our language courses we do not invest in infrastructure like classrooms instead we come to your home or office. That makes tuition more convenient for you and cheaper. By contrast, according to our values we do not save on our teachers not least because we are dedicated to offer quality service: Thus all of our language teachers are university trained and experienced with language instruction.

Founder and director of ZESS is Dominic Zimmermann, Master of Arts in Social Sciences and teacher for German as a foreign language since 2005.