Proof is no longer optional

By Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO, Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) 

Last month, I closed this column with a question. What do we measure when the impact is civic trust or public health, not just tickets sold? The rubric, I’ve come to realise, isn’t measurement itself. Rather, it’s proof. I’ve learned in the weeks since that I’m not alone. 

My colleague and friend, Michael Bobbitt, CEO of Opera America, recently observed at Association of Arts Administration Educators’ (AAAE) 2026 annual national conference, “The arts sector spends a lot of time making its case to itself.” Around the same time, field peer Angela Meleca, whose Return on Art™ framework helps arts organisations translate impact into evidence that funders and policymakers can act on, put it more precisely: the arts keep bringing ticket counts to outcomes meetings.

We don’t have a value problem. We have a proof problem.

Arts budgets are still the first line to be cut when scarcity arrives, not because foundations, health systems, city budget offices and workforce agencies fail to value the arts. Most do. The challenge is structural. These institutions allocate resources based on outcomes such as public health, workforce readiness, civic participation and economic resilience.

The arts are not exempt from that logic. Yet we’ve been slower to build the infrastructure that demonstrates our contributions in terms those partners recognise. The question is no longer whether the arts matter. It’s whether we can show our value beyond artistic excellence alone, through evidence aligned with the priorities of today’s decision-makers.

That doesn’t mean chasing the money. If our work genuinely delivers on our missions, that impact is our most authentic proof.

The economic case is already there

The evidence already exists. In 2023, arts and cultural production contributed $1.2 trillion to US GDP.¹ This was more than agriculture, mining, and transport and warehousing, and grew at more than twice the rate of the total economy. Independent venues alone contributed $86.2 billion directly to US GDP in 2024,² supporting more than 907,000 jobs. In the UK, creative industries generated £145.8 billion in GVA in 2024,³ growing four times faster than the broader economy.

Not a niche. Proof. Infrastructure.

Our story of proof is stronger than we think

 The evidence extends well beyond economics. A 2022 study led by researchers at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,⁴ in collaboration with George Mason University, found that deeper engagement with live theatre measurably increased empathy and perspective-taking.

A 2026 Scientific Reports study⁵ found that audiences attending live performances felt more moved, captivated and energised than livestream viewers, with heart rates rising and falling together throughout the performance. Presence does something a screen cannot replicate.

The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2026 Great Connector report⁶ adds another dimension. Arts participants are nearly four times more likely to be civically engaged – to volunteer, participate and feel a sense of belonging – even when accounting for income and education.

In-person attendance was the strongest predictor, increasing the likelihood of civic engagement by 177 per cent. These are not isolated findings. They are patterns.

The infrastructure already emerging

 Across the field, organisations are beginning to report outcomes in the language other sectors already use. In New Jersey, NJPAC’s ArtsRx programme became the first in the United States to partner with a health insurer,⁷ Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, measuring outcomes meaningful to healthcare. A 2026 longitudinal study of Arts Pharmacy, conducted under the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Institutional Review Board (IRB),⁸ found participants’ wellbeing scores increased by more than twice the threshold for clinically meaningful change.

Arts-based social prescribing initiatives are tracking confidence, belonging, agency and civic connection – the very outcomes health systems, city governments and philanthropy already prioritise.

What we must build next

 The next frontier is not simply collecting more data. It is creating shared standards that make those measures consistent, comparable, and useful across the field, so a health commissioner in Newcastle, a budget director in Newark and a city planner in Nairobi can evaluate evidence in ways they already understand.

The arts have never been a single-issue investment. They are what systems thinkers call a multi-solver: one investment generating returns across health, civic trust, economic vitality and belonging. That is our comparative advantage.

Each of these dimensions offers an opportunity to demonstrate outcomes we have long understood intuitively. But to realise that opportunity, we must build collaboratively and in the open, measure through shared standards, acknowledge what we still have to learn and recognise a simple truth: artistic excellence inspires people. Proof moves systems.