The Covid-19 pandemic has brought numerous economic challenges to our country and, in particular, to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In order to mitigate these challenges, Cascais Municipality launched a program of direct and specialized support to the local business ecosystem.

This program –Economic 1st respondents - aimed to ensure a set of services specialized in tax, legal, operational and management matters throughout the crisis management cycle facing SMEs, namely in emergency response, economic recovery and business normalization. To respond to each of these axes of the crisis management cycle,a multidisciplinary team was created, consisting of elements from the Cascais Municipality, Deloitte, DNA Cascais, AECC and Nova SBE.

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The know-how and competencies that each entity brought to the program were fundamental to its success. Together, we were able to:

i) Create an SME supporting line, which helped numerous companies and individual entrepreneurs;

ii) Organize webinars to raise awareness on the kind of existing measures and support at their disposal; and

iii) Disseminate the reports/tools developed by the 50 Nova SBE students under the supervision of Deloitte and DNA Cascais, within the scope of the Role to Play initiative.

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The collaboration with Nova SBE and, in particular, with the students who were involved was areal privilege. For the way they collaborated within and between teams, how they voluntarily embraced the challenges, for the immense creativity shown in each project, for their ability to remind us that we all can be change agents and, above all, for the direct and positive impact that this project achieved, at such unprecedented and adverse times in our economy.

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