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Do Good Deeds, Win Free Lady Gaga Tickets

posted by Stephanie.Wilding

By Sam Brand | Monday, June 7, 2010 5:30 AM ET

Listen up little monsters! Thanks to Virgin Mobile, you can help homeless youth and win a free ticket to Lady Gaga's Monster Ball Tour all at once.

Ticketmaster is charging between $60 and $300. Sellers on Craigslist are charging twice that. VIP packages are going for thousands of dollars. Yet, this summer, you can go to a Lady Gaga concert for free.

The catch? You’ve got to do something good to get in.

Clean a homeless shelter, landscape the lawn at a safehouse for runaways, deliver pens, rulers and binders to school kids who can’t afford them. Get your Gaga on.

The program, called FREE.I.P., is part of RE*Generation, a Virgin Mobile initiative established in 2006 to inspire the company’s 5 million customers to get homeless kids off the street. This year, FREE.I.P. is putting runaways in shelters and putting you in a VIP seat at the hottest concert of the summer. That’s right, you can do good and get a close-up of "Emma," Gaga’s new over-sized keytar (below left), all at the same time.

But opportunities to log hours and win tickets are going quick. Some sign-up sheets at the FREE.I.P.


If you want a ticket to Lady Gaga’s July 2 show in Boston, for example, you’ll have to be one of the first six volunteers to deliver 10 “ready to learn kits” to the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children & Youth (NAEHCY). You’ll also have to live within 100 miles of the venue, TD Bank North Garden, and you have to be 16 or older to participate. But count out the lawn clean up and painting project in support of Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Those opportunities to win tickets are already filled up.

Boston is just one city where volunteer opportunities are available. Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Houston, Denver and Kansas City also have openings for volunteers. Cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia – cities that will be hit during the second half of this summer’s Monster Ball Tour – will announce volunteer opportunities in July and August


Teaming up with Lady Gaga, who has long been a loud supporter of LGBT youth, is just the latest RE*Generation effort undertaken to help get kids off the street. In 2006, the initiative donated over 200,000 pieces of clothing to homeless youth through Virgin Mobile’s Txt2Clothe program. In 2007, RE*Generation partnered with the National Alliance to End Homelessness to lobby Congress to designate the month of November as National Homeless Youth Awareness Month. In 2009, FREE.I.P. took off during the first half of Lady Gaga’s “pop-electro opera” Monster Ball Tour, spreading 30,000 hours of community service across the US and donating 7,000 hygiene kits to kids at risk of sleeping in the street.


This year, Virgin Mobile expects FREE.I.P. to do even better during part two of a revamped tour. Felicia Hill, head of Cause Marketing & Partnerships, tells Tonic the program will bring in 50,000 hours of community service in 2010 and deliver more hygiene and school kits than you can shake a toothbrush at.

There are certainly more than enough kids out there who could use the help. Youth homelessness is everywhere in the US, affecting nearly 2 million people between 12-24 every year. According to RE*Generation, over 100,000 will sleep on the streets for 6 months or more. And they need our help more than any other segment of the homeless population. According to YouthNoise, the vast majority of homeless kids suffer from problems that will keep them homeless unless they’re given outside help – problems like drug addiction, mental illness and illiteracy. Twenty percent of homeless kids under the age of 18 have attempted suicide, and 63 percent of runaways are never reported or sought after by their guardians. Staggering statistics for a country that is by most measures the richest in the world.

But why is Virgin Mobile getting involved? Bob Stohrer, the company’s chief marketing officer, told USA Today last year, “As a youth-oriented brand, we wanted to mobilize young people around an issue that matters to them… Our consumers want to have a cause to get around that is local and unique to engage in.”

Youth homelessness fits the bill. And it doesn’t hurt that getting involved might be good for the company’s bottom line. “It’s not just good to be philanthropic, it’s good for business,” Dan Schulman, president of Virgin Mobile tells The Huffington Post. Schulman believes his customers want to make the world a better place, and he thinks offering them the opportunity to do so will increase their loyalty to the Virgin Mobile brand.

What does Lady Gaga think? According to a PSA addressed to her “little monsters” that ran before each of her 2009 Monster Ball shows, Gaga is “very angry” about the homophobia experienced by the one-in-five homeless youth who identify as LGBT. Matching donations texted by her fans during the tour, the pop superstar donated $25,000 of her own money to combat the problem. What will she do in 2010? With Lady Gaga, you never know until she steps onstage.


**** For more information please visit the link that I found this story posted on, http://www.tonic.com/article/do-good-deeds-win-free-lady-gaga-tickets/ ****

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