The Healing Retreat 2026 — November 13–15, Saugatuck, Michigan. Twenty-five men from our Chicago, Detroit and DC chapters and from across the country, on twenty private acres for three days of rest, movement and recovery. Your product gets lived with, and filmed honestly.
Seven categories are open. Each one closes to competitors.
Twenty-five Black and Brown men, capped on purpose. They come from ten cities — our anchor chapters in Chicago, Detroit and Washington, DC, and seven more across the country. Some drive four hours. Some fly overnight.
Every man here chose to cross a country to sit in a room with twenty-four others. That tells you how badly the room was needed and how little else exists like it.
This is not an event with thousands of impressions walking through a convention hall. It is intimate, experiential and human.
Past partners: lululemon · SheaMoisture · Chicago Bulls · Gucci · Pepsi
Selected as a lululemon Here to Be grant recipient.
03 · Why this weekend
For many men, rest is the thing we get to when everything else is finished. Work, family, leadership, community, expectations. Everything is rarely finished.
40.2% of Black adults reported getting fewer than seven hours of sleep per night in 2024, compared with 28.9% of White adults and 29.0% of Hispanic adults. Black adults were also the least likely of those groups to report waking up feeling well-rested.
That is why rest will not happen between activities at this retreat.
Rest is one of the activities.
Retreats have become the number one planned wellness purchase in America, at 49% of planned wellness spend. And women's retreats outnumber men's roughly six to one.
More Black men are heading outdoors than ever, and very little has been built for them when they get there. We want to help create spaces where we feel like we belong when we arrive.
That is the room your product would be in, and there is almost no one else in it.
Researchers have started studying what happens when Black men spend multiple days outdoors together. We have been doing it since 2020. The full research summary is in the partner deck.
Sources
04 · The weekend
Trees, trails, fire pits, porches, a barrel sauna, a hot tub and open spaces to gather. The property gives us something difficult to manufacture in a city: distance.
On the property
No performance.
No packed schedule.
No pressure to be anything other than present.
Meals are chef-prepared and communal — breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, coffee. Some of the best conversations may never appear on an itinerary. They may start while passing a plate across the table.
Across three days there are five moments a product can belong to: mornings and grooming, movement outdoors, recovery in the sauna and hot tub, meals around one table, and the fire at night.
05 · Where brands come in
Most partners fund this from brand and content budgets rather than giving. It is experiential marketing, and you leave with assets you have the rights to use. Some partners come in with product or an experience instead. Both work.
The product should belong in the moment, not interrupt it.
Twenty-five men live with your product for a full weekend — mornings, movement, recovery, meals. Not a thirty-second encounter and not a gifting table.
Where it goes from there is the conversation.
A short written report after the weekend: what they reached for, what they didn't, and what they said about it — in their words, unedited.
The Healing has anchor chapters in Chicago, Detroit and Washington, DC — standing community, not a mailing list. The retreat pulls from those three and seven more cities, and then everyone goes home. Your product doesn't land in one market. It lands in ten.
06 · How to partner
The best partnerships start with a conversation, not a predetermined list. Tell us what matters to your brand and we will build from there. Three shapes this usually takes:
A small number
Funding, product, or both
Product or experience
Seven categories are open. Once a category is committed it closes to competing brands, in the order commitments arrive. Everything is final on October 15, 2026.
Barrel sauna, hot tub, and three days of real fatigue. Recovery is a pillar of the weekend, not a side activation.
OpenSleep is the reason this retreat exists. Twenty-five men, three nights, one place to find out whether a product works.
OpenMornings here are ritual, and they are already on camera. SheaMoisture did this with us — used, not staged.
OpenEvery meal is chef-prepared and communal. Whatever is on the table becomes part of the weekend.
OpenMichigan in November. Layers get worn for three days straight and shot in natural light.
OpenTrails, porches, and twenty acres. Whatever is on their feet is in every frame.
OpenTwenty private acres, trails and fire pits, no other guests. Gear earns its place or it doesn't come.
Open07 · Proof
Each partnership has looked different. That is intentional.
Twenty-five men.
Ten cities.
One weekend.