Making the Value of the Arts Visible
What the APAP Conference Taught Me about Communication, Storytelling, Change, and Resilience
My very first day working for CultureSource as a part of the Communications team was November 5, 2024. It was election day, and I was grateful that the whirlwind of job orientation took my mind off of it. I was able to meet my coworkers with a smile, get a lay of the land, and start to get excited about everything that was to come, the ways that I could make a tangible difference in my own community. I began laying out the shape of my future in my mind.
The next day felt quite different.
We still show up to work as humans, despite efforts to the contrary, and my human-ness felt particularly weighty that day. The future that I had only just begun envisioning in my mind felt scribbled-over and abstract. I began to wonder if the Arts and Culture sector would survive this new upheaval, if I would be able to serve my community the way I imagined.
But then something interesting happened. This team that I had just been introduced to and knew almost nothing about shared some of their own human-ness they could not shake off, and then started to ideate and plan. CultureSource’s mission is to advance and cultivate creative and cultural expression in Southeast Michigan. There was never a question about whether we would be able to do that under this new status quo, only a negotiation of how. I realized that part of my role in that “how” as a part of the communications team would be to consistently work at new ways to show the value of our organization.
So, only a few short weeks later when family members at the Thanksgiving table cringed at my news that I had gotten a job in the arts and jokingly asked if I felt like I’d stepped onto a sinking ship, I said no. Sure, it was choppy seas and I hadn’t quite gotten my sea legs yet, but we would chart a new course.
Over a year later, the question of how we communicate the value of the arts followed me as I attended the 2026 Association for Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) NYC Conference. I still consider myself relatively new to the arts and culture sector, though I’m beginning to understand it more fully. It was my first time ever attending a conference, and I was very curious as to why our Executive Director, Omari Rush, had specifically asked me to go. APAP Conference is, of course, specifically intended for an audience of performing arts professionals, and while many of CultureSource’s members fall into that category, it’s not an aspect of our organization that I specifically interact with much, nor are the performing arts a part of my own artistic practice.
My experience over the course of the conference proved me to be a bit narrow-minded in that regard. I would learn that the conversations and problems facing the performing arts were in many ways universal to the arts and culture sector at large. To me, it was both fascinating and inspiring to observe this part of the sector grapple with this new status quo, especially as someone who wasn’t really around for the old one. Several themes emerged, but I focused heavily on ones that dealt with communicating the value of the arts:
- The arts are essential, but how do we prove that?
- The arts and health connection
- Finding and using your “WHY”
- Showing your work
The Arts are Essential, but How do We Prove That?
This is something that I’ve been thinking about as a Communications professional, especially as CultureSource starts to become more and more invested in advocacy work. We in the arts and culture sector—and those of us who are ourselves artists—have an intuitive knowledge of what it means when we say that the arts are essential, but does that mean that people outside of our bubble understand? How do funders, donors, educators, and policymakers interpret the idea that the arts are essential—and how does that interpretation influence investment and support?
In the APAP NYC Conference Opening Plenary session with Erin Harkey, CEO of Americans for the Arts, one of the very first points made was that the Arts and Culture sector is a $1.2 trillion dollar industry, and therefore the health of the sector significantly impacts the health of the economy. One might think that statistic alone would be enough to communicate value, but Erin Harkey later went on to say that in terms of giving an effective argument in favor of support for the arts, we as a sector might rely too much on the economic development argument, and that in fact the connection between arts and health, civic infrastructure, and early childhood development might be the most resonant ones right now.
“None of us are getting up every day because we’re trying to contribute to the GDP,” she joked early on in the session. But there’s a significant truth there, because while the economy is something that affects all of us in one way or another, it can sometimes feel like something abstract and far away. What might feel more immediate to someone is that the arts bring joy, that they’re both a facilitator and indicator of a functional and healthy society, that they have practical utility as well as the ability to unify, beautify, and communicate.
One of the sessions that focused on some of the more applied examples of the vital nature of the arts was Arts Rx: Building Health and Wellbeing Partnerships. That session spoke about the arts being instrumental to disease prevention and management, arts participation being a health practice in and of itself, as well as ways organizations could pursue an arts and health connection in their programming.
In this session, one of the panelists, John Schreiber of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, invited us to imagine performance centers as health centers—places where one could go to receive essential services and leave feeling better than when they arrived. He gave the straightforward example of his performing arts center offering free blood pressure testing at events, but he also suggested that centers such as his could function under the model of Arts Prescribing, a form of Social Prescribing that would come up several times throughout the course of the session.
Arts Prescribing would allow healthcare providers to refer patients to a variety of arts and cultural experiences that could support healthy outcomes. The panel talked about how medicine and healthcare is the first responder that helps put you back together after a crisis, but that long term, effective healing after the fact comes when patients can connect with the arts in some way.
Arts Prescribing is not yet a common practice in the US, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t programs that can help facilitate health and wellbeing. Telling the stories of the personal and community impacts that those arts and health programs have will be essential to arts advocacy and funding.
For example, CultureSource runs a program called the Exhale Memory Café Collective in partnership with the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation. The aim of the program is to support those living with memory loss and their caregivers by connecting sixteen of Southeast Michigan’s cultural organizations with the tools, training, and financial support needed to create and sustain Memory Cafés—welcoming spaces that foster creative engagement, connection, and respite. These Cafés will have undeniable positive wellbeing effects on individuals, families, and communities.
One of the organizations that will be hosting these Memory Cafés is the OPC Activity Center in Rochester. I have a personal connection with the OPC through my grandparents, who attended events, programs, classes, and social groups there for as long as I can remember. Their programs offer community, connection, as well as health and wellbeing. They especially helped my grandmother as she struggled with Parkinson’s, memory loss, and other mobility issues. Their senior dance classes helped her stay active and moving. Their drum circles let her create music when her hands wouldn’t allow for fine motor movements. Their poetry group was something that she was a part of for years and years to express herself, so when our family published them for her, they helped her to remember who she was when she wrote them, and then eventually let us remember her through her art. So when I learned that CultureSource would be granting the OPC money to expand their arts programming with a specific health focus, I felt both the joy of seeing an organization I care about getting more support as well as pride at having played some small part in it.
I think that this is why Erin Harkey said in her opening session that the connection between arts and health was the most resonant argument, because almost everyone can find a connection like that from their own lives between arts and health, even if they’re not immediately conscious of that connection. She said that because of this it will be important to be prepared with those stories when the time comes to make our argument. She gave examples of art as a tool for our veterans, to combat loneliness, to ease the aging process, aiding in early childhood development. I thought about small everyday examples as well—painting to lower your blood pressure, a song that keeps you from grinding your teeth, vocal practice that expands your breath control, a dance class that improves your mobility and flexibility. Not only are these practices that improve your health, but they’re ones that don’t feel like a chore because they are meant to bring joy.
And maybe that’s also why as someone relatively new to the arts and culture sector I found the question of whether the arts are essential to be so jarring. To me it was like asking if joy was essential. I would argue yes, it is, if only because our brains function on a system of rewards, and joy must certainly be a nice mix of those rewarding brain chemicals. But also because joy and creativity come in at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right in that sought-after self-actualization bit. (I would actually argue that creativity, art, and joy come in at every step in the hierarchy in some form or another, but will hold myself back for the sake of word count.) Arts give the gift of joyful experiences.
Erin Harkey, CEO of Americans for the Arts in conversation with Ken Biberaj, host of the podcast “Coffee with Ken”
ArtsRx: Building Health and Wellbeing Partnerships.
Michellene Davis, National Medical Fellowships, Inc. Nataki Garrett, Ladder Leadership, Inc. Dasha Koltunyuk, Princeton University John Schreiber, New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), Dr. Jill Sonke, UF Center for Arts in Medicine at University of Florida
Finding and Using Your “WHY”
So, the arts are essential, but we need to fund them, so how do we make that connection with the people that have money?
This emphasis on resonant storytelling continued in the other conference sessions I attended. One session, titled Case Making for College and University Presenters focused heavily on finding your “WHY”.
They defined the “WHY” as your cause, purpose, and core belief—WHY do you exist, and WHY do you do what you do? This WHY should then guide your HOW (Actions taken to deliver your WHAT—HOW you bring WHY to life).
It brought up an interesting question for me, because while I had a firm grasp on CultureSource’s WHY (again that mission statement: to advance and cultivate creative and cultural expression in Southeast Michigan), I wasn’t sure I knew my own. I thought I did, but had I ever put it into words? After reflecting on it, I came to a few conclusions:
- Art is the way that I see and process the world.
- Creating is foundational to who I am.
- Art is communication and community.
The clarity I felt after making these conclusions made me realize that people might not understand how they can achieve their own WHYs, and that a huge part of casemaking might be making the connection between the arts and any one person’s goals and core beliefs. That’s why one of the speakers in the session, Colleen Jennings-Roggensack of Arizona State University Gammage, emphasized the importance of things like impact reports: to remind funders, donors, authorizers, and patrons who you are and WHY they support you.
At that same session Mike Ross, Director of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, spoke about how he liked to think of the grand challenges the University was tackling (for example, the rise of loneliness and divisiveness) and connect them with the work he wanted to accomplish at his performing arts center. He could get his authorizers on board by connecting their WHY to his own and showing them the impacts of that work explicitly.
A similar sort of discussion happened at the Seven-Minute Arts Advocacy Pitch, where panelists talked about the importance of approaching one’s advocacy audience with empathy—finding a point of connection with whoever you are speaking to, even if they’re not in the arts and culture bubble, looking through the lens of their experience.
Lucy Sexton, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Culture & Arts, gave the example that you might be speaking with a policymaker about the importance of public funding for the arts, only for them to make a comment about how their young kid likes to make art. Some people might be tempted to clarify that that’s not the kind of art that they’re talking about or get frustrated thinking that this policymaker is diminishing their work. Lucy Sexton emphasized the importance of using that person’s connection to the arts to reach a common goal, rather than saying something that might put you more at odds with them. Their connection with their child’s art is also important, and we can find ways to weave that into our own advocacy stories. It’s another way to tie together what they want with what you want.
Slide from “Case Making for College and University Presenters: Creating Your Future”
WHY, HOW, WHAT model by Arizona State University
From “The Seven-Minute Arts Advocacy Pitch”
Speakers: Shane Fernando, Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts, Lucy Sexton, New Yorkers for Culture and the Arts, Gena Buhler, Turner & Townsend Heery, Claire Rice, Arts Alliance Illinois (not pictured)
Showing Your Work
Clearly and consistently showing your work is possibly the most vital part of connecting the importance of the arts to the people who will fund them. It was brought up again and again in every session I attended at APAP Conference:
- Erin Harkey talked in the Opening Plenary Session about how the ability to storytell about why the arts matter is incredibly important because many of the old tools are not working, but individual stories are powerful.
- The panelists of Case Making for College and University Presenters agreed that communicating the impact of their programs through reports, testimonials, and professional relationships was one of the most important factors in getting their authorizers on side.
- Speakers of the Future-Proofing the Arts session spoke about creating resilience by showing their work. Inviting audiences in and creating accessibility through social media, keeping budgets and reports radically transparent, being intentional about collecting and sharing data that adds signal to noise, and speaking openly with community leaders about your work.
- The panelists of the Seven Minute Advocacy Pitch advised people to have several stories and headlines ready to go that you can speak about at a moment’s notice, as well as collecting quotes and testimonials from the people who have already benefited from your work.
- The speakers of the ArtsRx: Building Health and Wellbeing Partnerships session urged us to demonstrate the concrete benefit the arts have on health outcomes in social programs, and to shift away from the idea that the arts are only for the elite few.
Conclusion
The conversations I witnessed at the APAP conference were extremely eye-opening to me. I felt like many people in the sector were trying to reframe old thought patterns that were beneficial in a time before I entered the field. As an emerging communications professional, I find myself in the arts and culture sector at a moment when the ability to articulate value is no longer optional. Across every session at APAP, that reality was unmistakable.
I got the impression that despite how much we might have to fight to prove our worth, we ourselves can sometimes forget our own value in the arts. Either because of that old rhetoric that the arts are just some frivolous expense that just starts to chip away at us if we’re not vigilant, or because we start to think too narrowly. Maybe even we inside the arts and culture bubble can forget that art is something that exists inside all of us, and that it is important to maintain that part of us, especially when so much else in the world is changing. It can feel like when the weight of the world is bearing down on us that there is so much else that is important, but actually it is essential that the arts are strong enough to help pick up the pieces of the things that break and begin to make sense of them. It’s our job as arts professionals to make sure that people understand how the arts can help them build, maintain, and repair, so that they can help us in turn when we need to make asks that will let us continue our work.
The arts are essential. Our work now is to make that visible.
