The FRECT project of the 2014 call for grants consisted of a training plan for land stewardship networks and entities.

The project “Stewardship Training: Training Program for Land Stewardship Networks and Entities” is an initiative of the Forum of Land Stewardship Networks and Entities (FRECT) that was a beneficiary of the 2014 call for grants. The initiative aimed to train custody networks and entities in seven autonomous communities, a figure that has been exceeded by the scope of the project’s actions. Other objectives were to launch workshops on good practices for land stewardship and to organise meetings in different parts of the Spanish territory to bring together agents related to land stewardship.

To achieve the objectives set, the project was structured in the celebration of six different conferences in which seven regional stewardship networks participated (Galician Land Stewardship Network, Trans-Cantabrian Land Stewardship Network, Castilla y León Stewardship Network, Castilla-La Mancha and Madrid Stewardship Network, Aragonese Stewardship Network, Avinença (Valencian Association of Custodians and Responsible Management of the Territory) and Initiative for the Custody of the Territory of the Balearic Islands (ICTIB).

On each day, framework presentations were presented, specific cases of land stewardship were presented – local or foreign to the network – and a series of workshops were held. The workshops dealt with good practices in custody, political advocacy or internal aspects of the networks to work on strategic issues for their operation. The conferences took place in Madrid, Zaragoza, Palma de Mallorca, Sagunto (Valencia), Santiago de Compostela and Fuentes de Nava (Palencia), with a duration of between one and three days. In each of them, a programme of presentations and workshops was followed that took into account the particularities of each autonomous community.

Those attending the conference valued very positively the quality of the speakers, the information offered and the learning achieved. The results of the conference made it possible to train agents from various networks and stewardship entities through the different workshops on good practices for land stewardship and the meetings organized.

In figures, the conference brought together more than 230 attendees from 124 different entities and the autonomous communities reached in total were 14. The participants belonged 60% to custodial entities or networks and 29.6% to other groups such as NGOs, individuals and professionals, members of local action groups and political parties, volunteers and the unemployed. A smaller number attended representatives of consulting, public administration, private companies, students and owners. The general assessment of the training provided was very good.

In view of these results, the initial general objective of training the networks and entities of seven autonomous communities, developing workshops on good practices for land stewardship and generating meetings in different parts of the state to bring together agents related to land stewardship, was more than achieved and the expected results were exceeded.