A founding partnership proposal
Several days on Grand Cayman anchored on the Emancipation Day holiday, May 2027. This page is written for Northwestern Media, and for the founding position in Christian radio.
What you already built
Northwestern Media went on the air in 1949 with one station and a mission to lead people to Christ and nurture believers in their spiritual growth through Christ-centered media. That mission now runs across 105 outlets in 13 states and reaches 175 countries.
No advertiser underwrites it. The whole operation stands on listeners who believe in it enough to send money when you ask, and on a university that has been in the business of forming people since 1902. Which is the reason this page exists.
The health of Northwestern Media is the health of those donor relationships. And a relationship that lives entirely on the phone, on the air, and in the mail has a ceiling built into it.
What we are building
The most influential international gathering for redemptive media, built as a hosted property rather than a ticketed festival. The people in the room are there because an organization they already trust flew them there.
Several days anchored on the Emancipation Day holiday, May 2027. Soft season on the island, which means airlift and hotel capacity are actually available.
Grand Cayman. A British Overseas Territory whose constitution commits the nation to Christian values and the protection of the family.
Up to 4,000 flown-in VIPs from major faith-forward organizations. Donors, leadership, artists, and the people who decide where ministry money goes.
Combined partner audience in the millions across radio, streaming, film, and social, with the week itself built to be broadcast and recorded.
Rise is sponsor and donor funded. There is no government money inside it, and no public subsidy behind it.
The argument in one picture
Your donors are spread from the Hudson Valley to the Black Hills. They give to the same ministry, listen to the same songs on the same mornings, and almost none of them have ever met each other. For one week in May 2027 they can.
Rise holds a seat block for founding partners. Northwestern Media decides who fills it.
The ceiling
You go on the air, you make the case honestly, and people respond. It works. It has worked for almost sixty years. But a giver who has heard some version of the same appeal for twenty years is not less committed, they are simply less moved by the format, and everyone in development already knows it.
Proximity moves a donor from steady to significant far more reliably than a better script does. Time with the people who actually run the ministry. Time with the artists whose songs they have been hearing in the car since their kids were small. Time with other donors who take the whole thing as seriously as they do.
That is very hard to manufacture at home. A banquet in a hotel ballroom buys you three hours and a goodbye in the parking lot. A week on an island, in a room your ministry built, is a different instrument altogether.
Your donor hears a voice they trust every single morning and has never once shaken that person's hand.
People give alongside thousands of others who share their convictions, and meet almost none of them.
Twice a year, same window, same medium. Predictable to you, and by now predictable to them.
Lane one
Northwestern Media brings a named cohort of donors to Grand Cayman as your guests. Rise holds the seats, builds the private programming around them, and stays entirely out of your donor relationships. You decide who comes, and you decide what you ask them for.
Every development leader we have talked to says a version of the same thing. Donors care far more about belonging to a group that matters than about a photograph with a headliner. Rise is built around that.
Lane two
One week on the island produces a year of programming. Rise carries a founding position in Christian radio, and Northwestern Media is the network we want in it, because you run both a music format and a teaching format and the week feeds both.
Lane three
No other Christian radio network in the country can do this part, for one simple reason. No other network sits inside a university with a Department of Media Arts down the hall.
Rise runs with a professional crew. Williams Productions handles on-island production, and Echo Concerts out of Nashville handles booking and artist coordination. Inside that crew we will hold a set of credentialed student positions for University of Northwestern.
This lane is the reason the conversation should include the university, not only the network.
Grand Cayman
A donor will take a call about a banquet. A donor will clear a calendar for this.
Ninety minutes from Miami and a single connection from nearly every market you broadcast into. English speaking, US dollar, no visa required for Americans.
Why here, and why us
Emancipation Day falls on the first Monday in May and marks the abolition of slavery in the Cayman Islands in 1835. Cayman is unusual in the region because there was no period of apprenticeship here. Freedom was full on the day it was read out. A gathering about redemption belongs on that weekend.
The Cayman Islands constitution states plainly that the nation is founded on Christian values and commits to the protection of the family. The government is an aligned partner in this, and ministry conversations across Tourism and Trade, Culture and Heritage, and District Administration are already underway.
May sits just after high season. Hotels, airlift, and the island's own attention are available in a way they are not in February.
Kenny Klepacki holds Caymanian status through his wife Kelly's family, whose grandfather was born on Cayman Brac. He runs existing businesses on the island and lives inside the community this event will draw on. Rise is a Caymanian venture, not an American event renting a beach.
Noel Williams of Williams Productions runs on-ground production. Matt Best of Echo Concerts in Nashville runs booking and artist coordination. Both were doing this work long before Rise existed.
The legal structure is real and already mapped. A Cayman holding company sits above a festival company and an IP company, with HSM as Cayman counsel and Johnson Pope in Florida on the US side.
The category
Rise is not auctioning this category to whoever bids highest, and we are not looking for one network to stand alone in it. We want the network that sets the standard the others follow. Northwestern Media is our first call.
Every partner at Rise participates financially, because every dollar behind this event comes from partner relationships. The founding position carries a rights fee, and the seat block carries a deposit at signature. Hosted seats are priced at a partner rate well below what any other buyer pays for the same seat.
Figures belong in a document with your name on it rather than on a web page. We will bring them to the first working session.
Fall 2026 is the window that matters. Northwestern Media builds its spring donor calendar in the fall. A partnership agreed after that misses the cycle it needs to sell into, and the first year is the one worth being early for.
From here
Six steps, none of which require a decision today.
Each step converts vision into intent, intent into design, and design into execution.
Before we talk
Four questions. Answer them and the brief writes itself, so the first conversation starts somewhere useful instead of at the beginning.
Answer the four questions above and this fills in.
Northwestern Media has spent seventy-seven years telling people that redemption is real. Rise Cayman is a week built to put your people inside that sentence.
Founder and CEO
Rise Cayman
Prepared for University of Northwestern, St. Paul and Northwestern Media. Confidential. Dates, program elements, and partner rosters are subject to confirmation. Rise Cayman is a project of Redemptive Pursuits.