SMI Chile researchers Mónica Morales and Nigel Wight travelled to the city of San Juan, where they delivered two new training courses on the social performance of this future mining operation, developed through a joint venture between BHP and Lundin Mining.
Vicuña Corp. is a joint venture between BHP and Lundin Mining, established to advance the integrated development of the Josemaría and Filo del Sol deposits, located in Argentina and Chile. The project has the potential to become a world-scale mining operation and is being developed with a long-term vision centred on responsible mining.
The first course, delivered in the town of Rodeo, approximately 200 kilometres north-east of San Juan, aimed to provide the foundational knowledge needed to understand mining activities and their interaction with the territory. The second, held over two days in San Juan, focused on how to manage social performance throughout the life cycle of a mining operation, with an emphasis on territory, social management, social risks and impacts, and internal capabilities.
The training is designed to address the fundamentals of managing social performance throughout the life cycle of a mining operation, integrating mining and territory to support effective social performance.
“We seek to position social performance as a technical component that must be embedded across the company’s different areas,” explains Mónica Morales. “For this reason, we value the participation of professionals from community relations, local content, human resources, institutional relations and environmental teams.”
“Taking part in this course was a very valuable experience, particularly because of the participation of employees from different areas of Vicuña, in addition to Community Relations,” adds María Soledad Méndez, Community Relations Manager. “This integration helped us recognise that relationships with communities are a shared responsibility across the organisation, and the course provided an opportunity for the different areas to understand the social impact of their activities and decisions. As well as being an opportunity to revisit, discuss and expand our knowledge, we were able to learn from comparative experience through case studies and good practices from other contexts, providing us with concrete references to strengthen the social management approach we have been promoting at Vicuña.”
This initiative forms part of the Advanced Training Programme in Mining, recently launched by SMI Chile, in collaboration with the Sustainable Minerals Institute at UQ, in the presence of the Minister for Trade of the State of Queensland and the Australian Ambassador to Chile.
