On Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending Orange RockCorps’ gig at Wembley Arena. We’ve done some creative strategic positioning work with RockCorps recently helping them to define their purpose, vision and their ‘why’ – ‘Moving a generation to change the world’. In fact, we have sort of fallen in love with what they do and their business model, directly incentivising youth community volunteering through the promise of an amazing musical gig. In their words: ‘Give, Get Given’.

It’s an amazing programme, using extrinsic motivations to engage, encoourage and reinforce intrinsic values of community, altruism and shared experience. It helps young people realise their power, fulfill their potential and ‘symbolically self-complete’ as the type of people who can make a real difference in their communities through volunteering. It is little wonder then that RockCorps’ work is being celebrated politically as a one of the very few genuinely impressive and scaleable examples of the much maligned ‘Big Society’ in action.

It also made me feel like a right Grandad at the ripe old age of 39! Looking forward to catching Primal Scream live (their all-time classic album Screamadelica is probably older now than most of the 11,000 youthful audience!), it was funny to watch the crowd’s reaction, mostly perceiving Bobby Gillespie’s energetic efforts as uninteresting ‘Dad rock’ and subsequently greeting other acts I’d never heard of (Wretch 32 anyone?!) with almost manic delirium! Well, there’s no accounting for taste…

That said, the sheer exhuberance of the crowd and the knowledge that between them they had racked up almost 50,000 hours of community volunteering was amazingly inspiring. They’ll be back for more I suspect and the elegance and effectiveness of the RockCorps model is proven once again. Now, I’m going to go and get myself up to speed on the grime scene before the next concert!