Before he got the text, Jacob Levy had never volunteered.
In late June, Levy, a 28-year-old who lives in Baltimore, got an offer through his Virgin Mobile phone about a new program that traded coveted VIP tickets to Sunday's sold-out Virgin Mobile FreeFest at Merriweather Post Pavilion for community service hours.
"I jumped on it," Levy said.
Levy was one of nearly 3,000 people who earned tickets - and some VIP passes - for the Columbia festival by volunteering their time. They gave blood. They put together hygiene kits for homeless youths. They even helped remodel a storage room at a domestic violence center.
"Our goal was to take people who don't usually do community service and get them out there," said Ron Faris, Virgin Mobile's senior director for brand marketing and innovation. "We knew the sold-out Virgin Mobile FreeFest would get them off the couch."
At most music festivals, concertgoers can man concession booths or pick up litter for a free ticket. But a festival-sponsored community service program of this size is virtually unprecedented, said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the trade magazine Pollstar.
"I've never heard of anything like this," Bongiovanni said. "It's much easier to do a free show and give the tickets away and not worry about it. This actually made more work for [organizers]. ... I hope it proves to be a model other people will follow."
The project was split into two arms: The Summer of Service, headed by Howard County Executive Ken Ulman, and Faris' Free I.P. program. The Summer of Service handed out close to 2,000 tickets, through Red Cross blood drives and other projects. The rest (about 1,000, Faris said) went to the Free I.P. program, which focused on youth homelessness.
Organizers set up Web sites with lists of available volunteer programs. Free I.P. asked participants to log at least 13 hours of community service, and rewarded them with VIP passes. For the Summer of Service, the number of hours varied depending on the project, and volunteers received general admission tickets. All told, the volunteers tallied tens of thousands of community service hours, Faris said.
"We were blown away by the number of people who stepped up to donate their time to the cause," Faris said. "It's not just the number of people who volunteered their time, but the speed in which they volunteered their time."
