A year ago now, the Queen and I returned to our annual meeting with young people in Girona on a truly momentous day for us, for our country’s institutions and for our recent history: just a few days earlier we had experienced, with great emotion and responsibility, my coronation before Parliament. Since then, logically, the Foundation has made the necessary changes to adopt our daughter’s title, the Princess of Girona; but the commitment, identification and affection the Queen and I feel for Girona and its counties remains totally unchanged. It will be simple to transmit these feelings to Princess Leonor.

In every new edition of the Forum and the awards that brings us to Girona, we find that the Foundation has continued to make steady progress.

With the awards, clearly, we recognise the merits that our juries have identified after analysing and evaluating the five winners, and at the same time we hold them up as a spokesperson, a benchmark, an example for many other young people that their dreams can always come true.

However, in addition to these awards, our Foundation also undertakes other projects with the aim of embracing and encouraging your aspirations. The Mentoring talent project seeks to contribute to efforts being made by society in favour of employment. Many of the young people being mentored by executives and professionals from companies all over Spain are here with us today. So, allow me to encourage you not to stop searching for all the tools available to improve your employability and your personal and professional prospects, as you have done by taking part in this programme.

At the same time, and aware of the importance of education, with the project Educating entrepreneurial talent our goal is to support and guide —which we are already doing— those who are driving educational change: teachers. The participation of so many educators here today and tomorrow at the IMPULSA Forum is absolutely crucial. We want to support you in your efforts to help our children become more self-sufficient; capable of working in plural and interdisciplinary teams; willing to take risks, to lead and to provide unique value propositions and solutions. The more help and support teachers can offer children to face these challenges, the better their chances of joining the labour market and the greater their possibilities of contributing to the productive economy of the future — which by definition will be highly specialised and with high added value.

Finally, and in this context, the Forum, which is one of the hallmarks of our Foundation —and which has enjoyed great success over the past years, with more than 7,000 participants—, must be constantly updated and renewed to continue effectively fulfilling its mission. This year we have collaborated and talked with young people and our award winners to reformulate the IMPULSA Forum as the ‘Forum of your opportunities’. The aim is to make it more accessible, to encourage greater interaction and a deeper connection between our speakers, experts and young people, creating the perfect environment for opportunities for inspiration to flourish.

This afternoon we have had the chance to listen to an exceptional woman. Believe me when I tell you that in the future you will remember the gift of Graça Machel’s words. Our heartfelt thanks to her for coming such a long way to the city of Girona, which is honoured to welcome her.

We have also learned about an entrepreneurial project with a global reach. Thank you, Mr. Devenport, for this and congratulations on Youth Business International’s great scope. I would also like to thank the four award winners, chaired so cheerfully by Juan Carlos Ortega, who have spread the same enthusiasm conveyed by the hands of pianist Marc Heredia.

Now, before I move on to talk about our award winners, I would like to take a moment to thank the entire team at the Foundation for their excellent work, and especially Toni Esteve, our President, who will be passing the baton to (Paco) Belil in a few days’ time.

Toni, we are extremely grateful to you for all your work. For your excellent work, which requires no further adjectives. Your enthusiasm, your drive, your energy and your conviction have made it possible to create and promote a project that is not only a benchmark for our young people, but is also an example of understanding, collaboration and participation. An example of the best possible coexistence for Catalonia and the whole of Spain. I would ask you to put your hands together to applaud with affection and recognition our first President.

Ladies and gentlemen,

For many years now, the young people on this stage have been asking themselves questions in very different areas. Bernat, Héctor, Olga and Samuel have worked hard to discover answers, to find solutions. The FPdGi has wished not only to reward their achievements and their successes, but also to acknowledge their courage in the face of adversity, and their perseverance to start anew again when the projects they had begun did not work out properly. We should remember that progress and improvement do not only occur when we achieve our goals, but also when, in trying to do so, we do not succeed.

Olga Felip Ordis was born right here in this city where she will now collect the 2015 Princess of Girona Foundation Award for the Arts and Literature. Although her interest in architecture, which prompted her to train as an architect, began in Girona, her curiosity and passion for the work of planning and building has taken her to places such as London, Paris, Venice, Barcelona and Edinburgh. In these cities she acquired the theoretical and practical knowledge that we can now enjoy in places such as the Plaça de l’Absis and the Ferreries Market Civic Centre, in Tortosa, or the Museum of Energy in Ascó.

The Jury for this category has emphasised the fact that her architectural work shows “an ability to combine the creation of new forms with respect for the environment while her sober, elegant, warm and bright designs instil a sense of harmony in the user, the viewer and the landscape.”

Héctor Colunga Cabaleiro, winner of the FPdGi Social award, has always been involved in the community initiatives of the neighbourhoods where he has lived, and in all of them has engaged in socially-committed projects based on solidarity and transformation. Whether in the La Calzada district of Gijón or in the Marianao neighbourhood of Sant Boi de Llobregat, Héctor has performed community projects to fight inequality and poverty that, in just a few years, have had a positive impact on thousands of young people who have benefitted from his initiatives to provide them with alternative leisure or to encourage social enterprise.

The Jury chose him for the award on account of “the continuous, coherent and committed work of this young social entrepreneur, whose projects contribute towards creating social capital and renewing forms of participation, providing proximity, transparency and citizen involvement.”

Samuel Sánchez Ordóñez, winner of the 2015 FPdGi Award for Scientific Research, is well aware that excellence knows no limits. After qualifying as a doctor in Chemistry in Barcelona, he did research stays in Holland, Japan and Germany. In Germany, Samuel worked as a researcher at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for intelligent systems, where he focused on the design of self-propelled nanobots that navigate the human body to perform medical tasks such as administering exact dosages of medicines.

Samuel returned home in January to join the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), where he works as an ICREA researcher, leading his own research group known as “Smart nano-bio-devices”.

The Jury valued Samuel’s “highly international scientific career which reflects his leadership in the field of nanotechnology.”

Bernat Ollé Pocurull, winner of the Princess of Girona Foundation’s Business Award, decided to take the leap from Camp de Tarragona to the city of Boston in the United States and attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he established an interest in the development and commercialisation of innovations in the health sciences. Bernat has succeeded in setting up four emerging biotechnology companies that to date have created forty jobs and undertaken projects ranging from a new type of drug for autoimmune diseases, to scientific advances in the treatment of baldness.

The Jury emphasised Bernat’s “excellent academic achievements and international business career, which has resulted in four business initiatives,” and also the fact that “his projects have caught the attention of the pharmaceutical industry because of their development and applications in the field of health sciences.”

Olga, Héctor, Samuel, Bernat: thank you very much for sharing your talent with all society, for not being afraid of hardship, for being such outstanding representatives of Spanish youth abroad and for bringing everything you have learned and that has improved you back home.

The Princess of Girona Foundation works each day to help other young people to develop the same talent that you have brought here today. We are well aware that there are young men and women from social backgrounds who certainly have had fewer opportunities available to them; young people who require everyone’s help in order to complete their education, to be successful at school and to integrate at work. Let us not forget them. The FPdGi each year therefore also acknowledges the work of an organisation that works to this end.

This year the Jury for the FPdGi Organisation Award has recognised the work the Fundación Secretariado Gitano has been doing since the nineteen-sixties to encourage the social integration, economic and educational support and assistance in training, employment integration and equality of opportunity among the Roma community in Spain.

Fundación Secretariado Gitano has helped them to attain full citizenship, to improve their living conditions, to promote equality and to prevent all forms of discrimination against such an extremely important community for our country.

It is an honour to have some of the young people involved in its projects with us at this ceremony and at the IMPULSA Forum. I hope that we can do our little bit to help them find success in their lives; successes which will henceforth, with your permission, also be those of the Foundation.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I began this speech by recalling our visit to Girona shortly after my coronation as King, a year ago now. During that ceremony before Parliament I asked all of Spain’s citizens to look towards the future with me. Here in Girona I highlighted the qualities of this land, for which its people are cherished and admired.

I was referring to your love for your language and culture, your entrepreneurial spirit, your capacity for initiative, your reflective and critical nature and your openness to the outside world. And I stressed that it is with these qualities that Catalan men and women have achieved their progress and contributed to Spain’s progress as a whole.

Years ago, at the Foundation’s presentation in this very same auditorium, I said that this was the start of a project that aimed to be the very best reflection of all this.

An inclusive project that adopted the hope of a Spain that, many years ago, decided to look ahead to the future and not to the past; that decided to add and not take away; that decided to unite and not divide; that decided to banish confrontation forever; and which had chosen the unwavering path of democratic coexistence in diversity based on freedom, citizenship and respect.

Since then, the Princess of Girona Foundation has aspired to be an example of that wise spirit of a shared quest for progress. Just as I experienced yesterday when we celebrated thirty years of this great collective success that meant our joining what is today the European Union. It has been a huge success for all, based on unity and the shared aim of citizens of Catalonia and all of Spain to build a better society for every man and every woman in our country.

We must continue to advance along this path, despite the difficulties, with calm and determination. Convinced that it is the correct way to go. Certain that we are on the right path.

And you may rest assured that this is how I feel and it is also my duty to remember it always. And today, here in Girona and in Catalonia, it is an excellent moment to reaffirm this before so many young people here with us today, full of ideas, drive, hope and enthusiasm.

Olga, Héctor, Samuel, Bernat, Sole, you are helping to renew Spain with your restless spirit and courage; with imagination and entrepreneurship, taking risks and innovating, with solidarity and dedication to others. It is with these attitudes, which are an inspiration to all of us, that progress is born, and with them you are building your own future and that of our country.  It is your moment and also your responsibility. Ours is to understand you, motivate you and support you in this task.

Thank you on behalf of the Queen and myself and on behalf of all those who make the work of the Princess of Girona Foundation possible.

I would like to welcome you all to Girona and to the IMPULSA Forum.

Thank you very much.