The outstanding reputation of Flinders’ Centre for Remote Health (CRH) for cross-cultural awareness training has taken another leap forward with Newmont Goldcorp Tanami Operations, selecting the centre as a preferred training provider. Newmont Goldcorp is the world’s largest gold producer with a stated purpose to ‘create value and improve lives through sustainable and responsible mining’.
An award-winning professional development course was developed by the CRH several years ago to provide an introduction to the culture of Central Australian Aboriginal people.
Newmont Goldcorp, which has operations and projects across four continents, selected the CRH through a competitive process for its Tanami Operations mine located 540 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs, on Aboriginal freehold land in the remote Tanami Desert. The traditional landowners for the region are the Warlpiri (Yapa) peoples.
The formal service delivery partnership provides new opportunities for the CRH to serve the community, this time in the mining industry, while supporting local people to devlop capacity and build a successful and sustainable training enterprise for others to learn about and engage with their culture.
The centre’s Indigenous academics Kathleen Martin and Barbara Richards, Flinders NT’s Deputy Manager Ross Carter, and contracts administrator Margaret Carey submitted the successful application. The project evaluation will be led by Professor Tim Carey, CRH Director.
“Our team’s skills, knowledge, expertise, and experience were exactly what Newmont Goldcorp were looking for in this exciting new partnership,” says Tim Carey
The CRH team are passionate about their role contributing to the knowledge economy by increasing the impact of training through industry collaborations. This latest partnership promises to stimulate capability development, economic growth and bring about positive societal change.
Based in Alice Springs, the CRH’s courses are also offered in a number of Northern Territory locations and targeted to participants across a range of sectors who are working, or interested in working, in remote Australia. The cross cultural awareness program aims to build the understanding, awareness, and appreciation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
With an initial contract of up to three years (subject to annual review), it is anticipated that the development and delivery of the Newmont Goldcorp Tanami Operations training will establish a foundation for future development, establishment and transitioning of the program delivery to a Warlpiri enterprise.