CONFARTIGIANATO IMPRESE VICENZA

Confartigianato Imprese Vicenza is a private not-for-profit association and Business Support Organisation (BSO) of Micro and SMEs, based in the city of Vicenza and born in 1945 with the aim of safeguarding entrepreneurs’ interests and supporting their actions to improve the local economic and social context. Today it is the largest employers’ organization in Italy with around 20,000 members from 39 business sectors (including a large number of tourism SMEs). It is part of a regional and national confederation of BSOs, namely Confartigianato Imprese, which is also a founding member of the umbrella organisation SME United in Brussels. The Association represents its members and promotes their interest providing them with information, assistance and consulting, encouraging entrepreneurial modernization and innovation, supporting start-ups’ development as well as developing policies pro work, pro welfare and pro quality of life. Hence, its main activities include advocacy and lobbying to defend stakeholders' interests in front of Policy Makers (at local, regional, national and European level), the provision of a wide and qualified range of services to support them in "everyday activities", the promotion of economic initiatives favouring aggregation processes among SMEs in order to overcome some of the constraints due to their small and micro dimension as well as internationalization services promoting and strengthening Vicenza's exporting capacity. Throughout the years, our association has also been managing several regionally, nationally and internationally funded projects, including Erasmus+ and Interreg projects, involving an increasing number of companies from different sectors and fostering the important exchange of expertise and good practices at a European level. Capitalizing on our association’s experience in supporting over 1.300 companies from the wellness & beauty sector, we are looking for Erasmus partners to build a consortium and submit a proposal focusing on the importance of those specialists, particularly in such a delicate context affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides, we are open to other opportunities of collaboration under next E+ call for proposals.