On Friday 3 and 10 February, training sessions were held on the "New guide for the evaluation of local cultural policies". This guide was elaborated by the Econcult and Culturalink team for the FEMP (Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces).

This publication is designed to support the elaboration and evaluation of local cultural policies. The Guide contains 173 indicators that facilitate the work of local entities to understand the local cultural ecosystem, which is so important to fight the demographic challenge and nourish our economy and social development.

As a novelty, it incorporates aspects that cannot be postponed and which must be addressed by any public policy that aims to have an impact on the cultural life of citizens, such as equality, sustainability, connectivity and the networked relations of any cultural system.

The guide introduces such vital areas as the satisfaction of citizens' cultural rights; how to influence and measure the relationships between Culture and the economic system, Culture and social articulation, Culture, health and well-being, Culture and education, and Culture and Sustainable Development Goals.

The training was carried out with the aim of being a "training for trainers". In other words, it was a pre-training for people involved in the training of local cultural agents and staff of local councils, specifically in the Canary Islands. The "trained trainers" were Álvaro Fierro (Cultumetría), Irene Aláez, Belén Gil and Macarena Pérez (all three from "Una más una").

In these trainings, the purposes of the guide were explained, as well as its main ideas and the way to achieve the different indicators. In the coming months, another team from the Department of Applied Economics (the unit of "quantitative methods for the measurement of culture") will be in charge of transferring these data and pooling them in a system of cultural indicators that will enable monitoring, comparisons and local diagnoses to be made.