Employee and Community Well-Being 44 COVID-19 Serving Our Communities in Their Time of Need Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve focused on protecting our employees and doing what we can to serve our communities. We provide timely communication to our workforce, including posting COVID-19 daily news roundups; updating just-in-time protocols; supplying wellness kits, face coverings, hand sanitizers, lens wipes and reference cards; and consolidating relevant links and materials into a COVID-19 Information Resource Center. Because most of our work is designated as part of national critical infrastructure, the vast majority of our employees continued to work to fulfill our obligations to national security, even as other employers suspended operations. Our top executives remained on the job and in their offices, on the shop floors or on the deckplates. We responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic in an all-encompassing manner: y Employees: We quickly implemented measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other relevant authorities to provide safe working environments. y Suppliers: Recognizing the importance of liquidity to the thousands of small businesses in our supply chain, in support of DoD policy, we advanced more than $2 billion in accelerated cash payments to our suppliers to ensure they could meet their financial obligations, especially to their employees. y Communities – First Responders: We worked directly with the federal government to rush our stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE) to locations around the country where they were most needed, all at our expense. – Charitable Organizations: General Dynamics made financial donations across its business units to charities, hospitals, COVID-19 relief funds, health foundations, food banks and other nonprofits as they responded to the impacts of the pandemic. – Schools: As schools began to reopen, many struggled to obtain adequate resources to ensure the safety of students, teachers and staff. Personal protective gear such as gloves and masks, new cleaning supplies, and additional staff were necessary to ensure that proper protections against COVID-19 were in place. Underfunded schools, in particular, scrambled to gather essential supplies. Recognizing the critical role masks played in limiting the spread of the coronavirus and promoting safety in schools, General Dynamics partnered with the Business Roundtable and the United Way in America’s Mask Challenge, which challenged American companies and organizations to help put masks in the hands of students, teachers and staff in schools across America by the end of the 2020-21 school year.