APAP

A stronger claim on APAP's power.

The engagement began with a repositioning: APAP isn't a membership convenience — it's national infrastructure connecting 1,600+ organizations and 5,000+ professionals across the performing arts field. That reframe produced three pillars — Arts Shape Innovation, Arts Drive Health and Wellness, and Arts Catalyze Civic Trust — with workforce development threaded through all three rather than boxed off on its own, and a 70th anniversary theme carrying it into APAP|NYC 2027: "Welcoming the New, Becoming the Next."

Underneath it sits the core reframe: the performing arts as essential civic and economic infrastructure, as vital as roads, schools, and public health systems. The field isn't asking for support — it's demonstrating power it's had all along.

Lisa Richards Toney credits this trajectory directly to Sam's reframing of the field's value proposition — how the power of the arts gets positioned, what the field needs to keep delivering community impact, and the reimagined APAP mission built to deliver it. The specific mechanism: APAP's first-ever direct ask of its own audience, run as an FY-end LinkedIn campaign from May through August 2026.

An advocacy operating system, not a one-off campaign.

The centerpiece is the Advocacy and Strategy Resource Hub, with eight tools built for members to use directly:

• Local Advocacy Action Guide
• Message Reframing Matrix Tool
• Funder Mapping Tool
• Sponsorship Positioning Tool
• AI Resource Hub for the Performing Arts
• Risk to Realignment: H.R.1/OBBBA Guide
• International Arts Messaging Guide
• Expanded Advocacy and Strategy Resource Library

Alongside the hub: a full Style Guide and Messaging Framework built across the three pillars, and five live properties carrying the strategy into the world:

investinapap.info runs the corporate sponsorship platform built on the same three-pillar architecture, structured in tiers from $25K to $100K+, with outreach underway to National Medical Fellowships, BPAM/Korea, and IBM, Apple, Google.org, and Anthropic.

From a policy summit to a council record — and back out to the field.

A direct pipeline ran from the NIVA Live Policy Summit to testimony before the DC Council on the RESALE Amendment Act of 2025 — delivered October 22, 2025 [video, 6:14:14], grounded in field-specific documented harm rather than generalities: Fever Labs, Livermore Valley Performing Arts Center, a Utah patron, and Wharton Center. The case ran on two tracks — cultural access, a $30 ticket becoming $150 pricing out DC residents, families, and seniors, and the economic argument, that predatory resale drains dollars from the creative economy without creating value.

At GIA Hill Day 2025, meetings ran on named legislation:

On the federal defense side, a May 2026 Capitol Hill briefing effort helped hold NEA FY2026 appropriations at $207M against a proposed cut to $135M.

ArtsLink Assembly 2025 — La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, NYC

Public panel contributions, November 6–7, 2025:

One market builds the next.

The Wisconsin/Madison 70th-anniversary extension is built to use NYC 2027 as the recruitment engine for a second market — turning a single anniversary moment into a repeatable expansion play rather than a one-time celebration.