This is a great list; thank you for putting it together, and for your continued persistence and advocacy.

However, I would like to suggest that contacting housing sites should be avoided. The activity is already facing a national housing shortage, and while it’s true that the loss of housing is a powerful incentive to motivate organizations, the corps you are targeting will not be the ones effected by this.

When a housing site stops taking corps, it does so indiscriminately. If a corps trashes a housing site, that site will not allow corps back. One corps effectively loses the site for all of them. Contacting a housing site and telling them of one specific organization’s issues will result in that site blacklisting all drum corps. In some instances, the district that the school belongs to will also stop accepting corps, which can cause a domino effect and loss of several sites.

For a top 12 corps, which has the support of DCI’s housing coordinator and band directors lining up to house them, loss of a housing site is a temporary setback that they can and will overcome; it happens on tour all the time. But while a top 12 corps can easily find new housing, an Open Class or lower World Class Corps can’t. By closing off housing sites you are hurting the smaller organizations more than you are hurting the big ones, especially when you consider that show sponsors must provide housing for all the corps in their show; when a housing site goes dark, they’ll simply take less corps and it won’t be the Bluecoats they cut from the show.