Elle Crosby - 27 June 2018

Andy Lemay has been honoured for his volunteer work with CIM by his alma mater, Laurentian University.

The Laurentian University Alumni Association has created a campaign to encourage its members to give back to their communities called One Million Hours of Volunteerism. The objective of this initiative is to inspire alumni to cumulatively volunteer one million hours of their time within two years.

Lemay helped the alumni association make a significant push toward its goal when he began logging the hours he’s participated with the Maintenance, Engineering and Reliability Society (MER) of CIM.

Lemay has been a CIM member since 2003. He started volunteering with MER in 2008 as a vice chair and became chair of the society a few years later.

“I had retired and I saw that there was a lot that needed to be done with the organization and they had initiatives that I wanted to help them get off the ground, so I got involved,” explained Lemay.

While Lemay has contributed to several aspects of the society, he views as his greatest accomplishment the part he played in the collaborative effort to get all of MER’s technical papers into OneMine, a collective online digital library of mining. “Now we can peer review any paper from anywhere in the world, and that helps get us out of the silos to work with people in different sectors. It’s also great because it helps us reach students and professionals alike.”

At a dinner with the Dean of Laurentian University, Lemay had the chance to speak with other esteemed volunteers about the One Million Hours of Volunteerism initiative, which is engaging alumni in different sectors of various ages.

“We need to keep working together. We need to keep breaking down the silos in mining. We need to include more of the students and support and mentor them. You can’t mine on your own, so we need to have a support system,” said Lemay.