Developing and nurturing strong partnerships—both within Teck and outside—is fundamental to how we do business. We know through experience that strong partnerships provide many benefits to the communities where we operate and to Teck. They add a depth of experience and perspective to our work and power us to innovate and to build a safer, more sustainable, more productive Teck.
Two of our core values in particular—Integrity and Respect—help guide how we approach these partnerships: we are honest, ethical, and fair in our words and actions, we honour our commitments, work to maintain our reputation as a partner of choice in mining and exploration, and we listen to each other and our communities of interest. These commitments are at the very core of who we are.
In this issue of Connect, we highlight a few of the many partnerships we are proud to be engaged in.
We cannot shine a light on partnerships without first acknowledging our relationships with Indigenous People. On August 9, the world and Teck marked International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a day established by the United Nations General Assembly to promote and protect the rights of the world’s Indigenous populations. At Teck, our partnerships with Indigenous Peoples are a reflection of our commitment to respecting their unique rights, cultures, interests and aspirations.
We’ve highlighted a few examples of these in this issue of Connect, including “A Spotlight on the Fort McKay First Nation”, one of 14 local Indigenous groups we have reached agreements with in relation to our Frontier oil sands project. And “Empowering Indigenous Women in Chile” provides an overview of how UN Women and Teck have extended our partnership to work together to provide access to education and training to Indigenous women in northern Chile through a US$1million investment from Teck.
As we continue to build strong relationships with Indigenous Peoples, we are guided by our commitment to understanding our respective priorities and perspectives, and ultimately creating lasting mutual benefits.
This year we also continue our focus on advancing our work in innovation and technology, an area very important to our future success. Strategic partnerships with industry leaders are helping propel our work in this area. “A Perfect Equation: People + Partnerships = Big Benefits” showcases our partnerships with Google and Pythian, which have already achieved real results at our steelmaking coal operations, while also laying the groundwork for long-term benefits by empowering our people with essential machine learning abilities.
Areas like machine learning, along with many other new technologies and innovations being explored at Teck, have a significant potential to reshape our business and are critical to our long-term success. I have had the opportunity to see first-hand many other grassroots, ingenious ideas across our company, and I encourage all of you to continue being bold when generating new ideas for our business.
As we look to the remainder of 2018, let us all continue to look for ways to leverage the power of partnerships. Whether it’s developing new or building on existing relationships among our co-workers, between departments, across our operations, and with the many groups we work with outside of Teck—together, we are stronger and can find innovative solutions to reach our common goals.