A partnership proposal for Mission Aviation Fellowship
For eight decades MAF has flown help and hope to people the roads never reached. Rise Cayman is a festival on an island the roads never reached either, and it brings the donors who fund that work into one place at one time. We would like to hand MAF that room.
Red Carpet Airways opens the run to the Cayman Islands. Founded by my wife's grandfather.
The Tibbetts line. Where my family's Caymanian status comes from, generations back.
Relatives inside Cayman Airways, the national carrier since 1968. My own logbook, still open.
Rise Cayman. Up to 4,000 flown-in VIPs, and a national holiday about freedom.
Why this room
Rise Cayman is a ticketed public festival of faith, music, and purpose, open to the entire island. Around it we fly in up to 4,000 VIPs from major faith-forward organizations as part of premium donor packages, and they sit alongside Caymanian families, businesses, and the national holiday crowd.
That guest list is the part worth pausing on. These are people who already give to missions work, who already sit on boards and mission committees, and who have already said yes to getting on a plane for something they believe in. MAF spends most of the year explaining why the airplane matters. Here, the airplane is the reason they showed up.
The Cayman Islands Government is a sponsor of the event, alongside Caymanian businesses and families and a group of United States organizations and nonprofits. Combined partner audience reach runs in the millions.
The overlap
It is the family business, and it has been for three generations on both sides of my house.
In 1978 Red Carpet Airways was flying nonstop between Clearwater and Cayman Brac, and running the interisland hops between Grand Cayman, the Brac, and Little Cayman on Convairs, DC-3s, and Trislanders. My wife's grandfather started that airline. Long before that, my own family line runs through the Tibbetts name on Cayman Brac, which is where our Caymanian status comes from.
Today I have relatives inside Cayman Airways, the national flag carrier, and that relationship is already open as we work the group air block for Rise. I fly myself. So when MAF talks about a pilot mechanic who is the only reliable link between a village and a doctor, that lands in my house as something closer to a family story than a case for support.
Which is why MAF is the partner I want in the aviation seat, rather than a category we fill with whoever calls back first.
A ministry built by WWII pilots, on an island opened up by bush pilots, at a festival run by a pilot. Kenny Klepacki, Founder and CEO, Rise Cayman
MAF was founded in 1945 by pilots coming home from the war who thought the airplane could carry something better than what they had been carrying. Betty Greene flew the first flight the following year. The Cayman Islands were opened to the world on the same kind of aircraft in the same era, by pilots doing the same unglamorous work of connecting small places to big ones.
Grand Cayman is a good place to tell that story, because the audience is standing on the proof of it.
The date
Rise runs across several days anchored on the Emancipation Day holiday in May 2027.
When emancipation reached the Cayman Islands in 1835, it came without the apprenticeship period imposed across much of the British Caribbean. Freedom arrived whole, at once, with no waiting period attached to it. Caymanians have marked that ever since, and the holiday remains one of the most meaningful days on the national calendar.
For a ministry whose work is reaching people who have been cut off, that is a better frame than anything a beach could offer. The message MAF flies into remote places is the same one the island celebrates in May, which is that release is not rationed out in installments.
The proposal
We are asking MAF to take the founding position in the aviation and mission category, and to run a donor activation inside the festival while its people are already on the ground.
The founding position holds the aviation and mission category for MAF across the first edition and gives right of first refusal in the years that follow. It carries stage presence, brand placement across festival environments, inclusion in pre-event promotion running through partner audiences in the millions, and a named role in how the aviation story gets told across the whole weekend.
Founding partners are also written into the origin story of the event, which is a position that only exists once.
A private fundraising track for MAF donors and prospects, built inside a festival MAF does not have to produce. We handle the venue, the production, the hospitality, and the arrival logistics. MAF brings its people, its stories, and its ask.
Your donors get an island, a national holiday, a main stage, and a reason to travel. Your development team gets several days of unhurried access to them, which is the part that is almost impossible to buy at home.
On the ground
Most of these pieces already exist inside MAF. We are supplying the room, the audience, and the week.
Timing
Partner organizations lock their spring 2027 programmes during the fall 2026 planning cycle. Anyone who has not committed by then builds that season around something else, and the category goes to whoever moved first.
We would rather that be MAF, so here is the sequence we are working to.
A working call with MAF development and church engagement leadership. Thirty minutes is enough to know whether this is real.
Term sheet from us covering the founding category, the donor activation scope, hosted seat allocation, and deposit at signature.
Signature, category reserved, and MAF lands inside its own planning cycle rather than fighting it.
Joint invitation build. MAF donor list, Rise hospitality inventory, and the air block worked together.
Programme lock, content capture plan, and final donor confirmations.
Rise Cayman. Several days anchored on the Emancipation Day holiday.
Next step
Bring whoever owns donor engagement and whoever owns the aviation story. We will come with the term sheet already drafted, because the fall planning cycle does not wait for anyone.
About Rise Cayman
The Rise Cayman Music Festival is a ticketed public festival of faith, music, and purpose held in the Cayman Islands, open to the entire island and anchored on the Emancipation Day holiday in May 2027. It is the most influential international gathering for redemptive media, bringing up to 4,000 flown-in VIPs from major faith-forward organizations together with Caymanian locals, businesses, and families, with combined partner audience reach in the millions. Rise Cayman operates under Redemptive Pursuits and is sponsored by the Cayman Islands Government alongside Caymanian businesses and families and United States organizations and nonprofits.
Learn more at www.RiseCayman.com