Community Investment

At General Dynamics Canada, we put our commitment to the community in action. We find increasingly creative and beneficial ways to generate financial support for the many organizations in the community needing assistance. We also look within our organization to our families to see what we can do to reach out to this group.

Rated "A" for community involvement by the annual Top 100 Employers competition in Canada, we support a variety of over 50 charitable organizations locally and nationally each year. Our employees take part in helping us select the charitable groups we assist.

We are very active with the United Way. We ensure that our many internal social activities (Employee Olympics; GD Canada Idol; Raffles/Draws; etc.) generate money for charities such as the United Way and local hospitals. We pay for the salary of an employee to go work for the United Way for 5 months of the year. Further, the company has a payroll program whereby it matches employee donations to the United Way! Our extra efforts in assisting this organization were acknowledged in October 2005 by local media.

Through our employees, we reach out in a number of other unique ways. Each year, an employee runs a "Toy Mountain" drive on behalf of the Salvation Army, whereby employees donate toys to those less fortunate. We sponsor employees in local events such as HOPE beach volleyball and Dragon boat races, which are events that raise funds for charities such as cancer research.

Each year every employee receives a Christmas turkey, but we make sure to order extra so that we can help out those families less fortunate in our community. Additionally, we collect food donations each year during the holiday season for the Calgary Interfaith Foodbank.

For years we have made it a priority to give employees easy access to donating blood. Therefore, we host the Canadian Blood Services "bus" on-site every 3 months so that employees can walk out the front door at work, into the bus, and donate their blood to those in need.

The company invites the employees to nominate a co-worker for the Volunteer of the Year Award, representing volunteer contribution to the community. The successful nominees are recognized and presented with a plaque by the President at one of the Company Communication meetings.

We provide coop work opportunities to students in the local secondary schools. We provide scholarship awards to local secondary school students and university scholarships each year to children of 6 of our employees.

All told, we make giving back to the community an important part of our mission at GD Canada and all our best ideas are generated by the employees themselves!