Community relations at exploration

Facilitators: Sarah Mackenzie (lead), Dr Jo-Anne Everingham, Pam Bourke

Duration: An estimated 25 hours of work across 5 weeks (Participants work in their own time apart from three scheduled live webinars).

Participant Profile: Those involved in mineral exploration including geoscientists, community relations staff, consultants and early-stage regulators.

Overview: This Masterclass is designed to deepen conceptual understanding of the social issues and potential impacts of exploration activities on local communities.

The mineral exploration context is raising new challenges and expectations. As ‘first boots on the ground’, exploration teams are in a unique position. Participants will gain insights and initial tools and skills to enhance community relationships at this stage of the project lifecycle, and to build an accessible and useful knowledge base of social data, all crucial to future project development.

The program includes:

• Landscape and community analysis.
• A framework for operationalising and understanding social data.
• Engagement at the exploration stage.
• Stakeholder mapping, engagement approaches and dialogue principles.
• Identifying social risks, impacts and opportunities.
• Investing strategically.

Run over five weeks, the Masterclass offers participants a range of exploration and community relations expertise via video and audio clips, interactive exercises and online discussion forums. Participants work through these materials in their own time. There are also three live webinars that are scheduled at the beginning, middle and end of the course.

In total, it will require approximately 4-5 hours a week of participant time.

There is a final assignment to apply the learnings and obtain a completion certificate.

What you will learn:

• Apply layers of social data to build a community profile and social knowledge base.
• Describe key steps and considerations in stakeholder mapping.
• Demonstrate understanding of the skills and principles of dialogue.
• Recognise potential impacts on and opportunities for communities associated with exploration projects.
• Align data, community feedback and impacts and describe their interaction and suitable systems for exploration teams to record and respond to these.

Analyse and assess whether options for strategic investment are appropriate to various phases of exploration in various contexts and could contribute to shared value.