10,000 Hours and SCOPE Productions celebrate this year’s student volunteers with an IMU concert featuring hip-hop and lots of Girl Talk.

Gregg Gillis, also known as hip-hop mashup DJ Girl Talk, said he doesn’t know what to expect at his concert tonight.

“[My performances are] highly dependent on the audience,” he said. “It goes down differently every night, so every show has an independent feel to it.”

But SCOPE public-relations coordinator Clark Bradshaw has a slightly more precise idea.

“Everyone on SCOPE who has seen Girl Talk before has really good things to say about his performance,” Bradshaw said. “It’s really fun — he makes people get out of their seats. It’s just a real party.”

The festivities are well-deserved. Girl Talk’s performance will recognizes the culmination of the 10,000 Hours Show of Eastern Iowa’s efforts to engage students in volunteering. In order to attend the concert, students must have donated at least 10 hours in community service and registered these hours with the 10K organization. The Girl Talk show, co-hosted by SCOPE, will kick off at 7:30 p.m. in the IMU Second-floor ballroom with opening act Poison Control Center.

“I think this is going to be one of the best shows we’ve ever had … the numbers are looking very good,” said UI undergrad Larry Hau, the executive director of 10K. “[SCOPE] has been fantastic in working with us. We wanted to tap into its expertise in putting on a concert … It would be much more difficult if we had to do it ourselves.”

Bradshaw said SCOPE plans to continue its partnership with 10K.

“SCOPE loves to help out any chance we can get and to also work with other student organizations on campus,” he said.

Girl Talk’s show this year marks the sixth anniversary of the 10K concert. Previous acts were OK Go, Jack’s Mannequin, Cake, Guster, and Ben Folds.

Gillis said he is looking forward to the show.

“I play everywhere, and anytime it’s for any sort of legitimate cause, it adds some excitement to it,” he said. “It seemed like a cool opportunity so I jumped on it.”

Though Hau stressed that though the concert is perhaps for what his organization is best known, the group remains an active force in the eastern Iowa community year-round.

“[10K] originally started as a way to celebrate students getting involved,” he said. “Everybody focuses on the concert, but we do very much focus on the aspect of volunteering and getting students involved. Our objective is to continue to pull in students and expand this feeling of volunteerism over the campus.”

Student volunteers can select from a wide range of opportunities to earn the hours required to attend the concert. Hau said 10K usually acknowledges around 200 people engaging in service at any given time, and past volunteer activities have included walking dogs, building houses, cleaning up trash, working with children, and doing secretarial work for nonprofits.

“Our goal is to get kids involved with the things they want to do,” Hau said. “The big service that we provide is helping something they are interested in. A lot of times, students don’t get involved because they don’t want to build a house, they’d rather walk dogs. So our job is to help connect them with that opportunity … We recognize volunteerism, not a specific type of volunteerism.”

Hau said he is anticipating a great concert to commemorate this year’s volunteer efforts.

“At risk of sounding cliché, I think the sky’s the limit for the concert this year,” Hau said. “I know that Girl Talk always puts on a fantastic show … I think that we’re going to have solid attendance, and all will be happy with the work they put in this year.”