Adrienne Husny: Leaders Of Tomorrow

Learn English with Adrienne Husny. At the 2025 FerMUN Opening Ceremony in Geneva, she welcomes students from around the world and reflects on labor, migration, imagination, and youth leadership. Her message encourages young people to believe in their voices, dream beyond borders, and work together to face global challenges.

Who This Speech Is For

• Learners interested in youth leadership, global issues, and Model United Nations.
• Students who want to discuss work, migration, cooperation, and international dialogue.
• Intermediate to advanced learners studying formal speeches with an inspiring tone.

How This Speech Helps Your English

• Learn formal welcome language used in international events and conferences.
• Build vocabulary around labor rights, migration, inclusion, and global cooperation.
• Notice how rhetorical questions create reflection and emotional impact.
• Study how a speaker moves from gratitude to a broader motivational message.

Why This Speech Matters

• Encourages young people to see their voices as meaningful in global conversations.
• Connects labor challenges with human rights, safety, and dignity.
• Shows how international student forums can turn diversity into collaboration.

Madam Volovaya, Director General of the United Nations Office in Geneva. Mr. Han Bo, Director General of the International Labour Organization. Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear MUN directors, fellow board members, dear participants, welcome to FerMUN 2025.

This conference wouldn’t be possible without all your help and support over the last months. We all made this vision a reality together. Now, I would like to specifically thank Ms. Volovaya for welcoming us here in this prestigious building of the UN, and especially here in this absolutely beautiful room.

Thanks to you, our MUN opening ceremony is held at the real UN, and this is an immense privilege for us. And thank you, Mr. Han Bo, for allowing us to host our FerMUN 2025 conference at the International Labour Organization. This is an absolute honor for us.

Equally, we are very grateful for the continued support of Ms. Mula, the head of the Official Relations and Correspondence unit at the ILO. Without her, this conference would have never taken place to start with. A big thank you as well to Mr.

Bonafont and Ms. Trudy. Your commitment means a lot to us. And we are grateful for our sponsors, the ENP Committee, the Delegation of the European Union to the UN, and the Conseil Départemental de l’Ain.

On behalf now of my fellow FerMUN students, I would like to thank Mr. Ted, our school’s principal. He gives us the chance to practice MUN every Wednesday. On a more personal note, thank you, Ms.

Boudry, as well as to our other FerMUN directors, Mr. Launay, Ms. Zuri, Ms. Dakunechni, Mr.

Robson, and Ms. Ruez. You stood by our side, guided and encouraged us, but most importantly, you believed in us. Thank you so much.

And now, our conference is actually really starting. What a privilege for all of us to be together here in Geneva. First, I want to say Happy New Year to all of us. We have this wonderful opportunity to meet here at the very beginning of the year two thousand and twenty-five.

The beginning of a new year always means a fresh start, just like this white paper here. Nothing is written on it yet. So let’s take this motivation and energy and create something new. Let’s search for solutions for urgent problems in the world.

And I can promise you already a week filled with great discussions, interesting topics, and wonderful shared moments of friendship. Now, the big topic of this year’s conference is labor. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot to do in this domain, and the future will probably get even more challenging. Our whole world is constantly evolving.

Artificial intelligence, robots, ChatGPT, it surely has its advantages. But how can we deal with the increasing number of people losing their jobs? Or let’s take a look at another topic, migration. In order to ensure their survival, more and more people need to take greater risks.

Sometimes migrant workers find no other solution than working in an unsafe and illegal space. They are unprotected from harm, exploitation, or even abuse. As you can see, we are facing significant challenges in the world of labor right now, and new ones will certainly appear in the future. So the question is, how do we create an environment where everyone is protected, included, where everyone has decent working rights as a human being?

Perhaps some of you are telling yourselves that the world I’m trying to describe is a dream world, a fantasy. It simply cannot be a reality. And while I agree that it doesn’t seem possible to make everyone happy, I want you to ask yourselves, when did we stop believing? When did we stop dreaming?

I think one of our strengths as teenagers is our imagination, the power to envision things. Do you remember the times we used to live in this sort of a pink bubble as a child, where everything was possible? I think deep in all of us is still a part of that young child who believed in miracles, who used to play with other children on vacation in another country. Despite not knowing the same language, we were able to communicate.

We were able to bridge our differences and just play, and there were no boundaries to our imagination. This is, for me, the magic in MUN. Just look around you for a moment. Students from eighteen countries traveled here.

We have people from Mexico, Germany, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or the US. All those different traditions, cultures, and points of view. Just like those little kids back then, we can start playing, working together again this week. Whatever seems to separate us can actually be seen as a strength.

It shows just how diverse we all are, how much we can learn from each other. Now, I’m sure that many of us teenagers heard people say that we are way too young. We don’t understand the complexity behind problems. We are too naive.

We should wait until we grow up and then start acting. Well, I don’t believe so. I can tell you that I have met experts from international organizations here who are very much looking forward to hear what we are proposing. They are interested in what we have to say.

They want to hear our voices. And therefore, I want to conclude by quoting one man, Johan Stander, from the WMO. He was standing here two years ago, and what he said still resonates in me. “You are not the youth.

You are the leaders.” And therefore, let’s put this pink bubble back on and imagine. Thank you.