Mike Ciresi and Roberta Walburn are big believers that positive actions lead to positive outcomes.
“My view is that each person, in their own unique individual way, should do their part to help make the world a better place,” Walburn said. “… People at different phases of their life will have different opportunities to impact the common good.”
That’s the philosophy that guided their $82 million donation to the University of St. Thomas in September — the largest in university history and the centerpiece of the university’s new $1 billion fundraising campaign for student scholarships and educational access. Providing support for a St. Thomas education, Ciresi and Walburn said, is their way of giving young people the tools to enact positive change in the world.
The story of how the two Minnesota lawyers came to fund millions in student scholarships is itself a story of cause and effect: the cause being a groundbreaking legal battle that tipped the scales against Big Tobacco companies nationwide.
Right place, right time
Ciresi and Walburn’s journey to philanthropy began in the mid-’90s, when the pair joined their firm, Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, in a lawsuit against the tobacco industry. They represented the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, taking the unorthodox approach of suing the tobacco companies for costs incurred by healthcare providers treating smokers.
Walburn said that at that point, major tobacco companies had remained untouchable in court despite decades of legal action against them.
“If you travel back in time to when we filed the suit, the tobacco companies were still denying that smoking caused cancer or any other health effects in people,” Walburn said. “So I think that’s hard for students today to wrap their heads around.”
The state sought to prove that the industry had suppressed information that cigarettes were harmful and addictive — and they needed to procure tobacco companies’ heavily fortified internal documents to do it. It also meant weathering the companies’ motions to dismiss and two appeals to the Supreme Court, according to the foundation.
Minnesota’s strong consumer protection and antitrust laws helped bolster their case, according to the foundation’s website.
Walburn said that the firm’s work also could not have happened without the efforts of countless other lawyers who had been trying cases against tobacco companies for 40 years before them, including New Jersey lawyer Marc Edell, who “single-handedly cracked open the door” on the industry’s documents.
“I think Mike and I were just fortunate to be in a position at a time where we could have an impact like that,” Walburn said. “No matter how hard we were working during the four years of that litigation, I always felt that I was lucky to be able to be doing that because I always felt that it was exactly what I should be doing during that period of time.”
Ciresi and Walburn’s persistence paid off: the firm procured over 35 million pages of documents, which were made public when the tobacco industry settled in 1998. The state of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield received over $7 billion in damages, which Walburn said the state is still receiving to this day.
From cigarettes to scholarships
Ciresi said that part of the state’s case hinged on the fact that tobacco companies had been knowingly marketing toward minors as older customers died from smoking-related illnesses.
Because of this, Ciresi said that using the $550 million in fees awarded to the firm to fund a foundation serving Minnesota children was obvious to him. The Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi Foundation for Education, Public Health and Social Justice — later renamed the Ciresi Walburn Foundation after Ciresi left to start his own firm in 2015 — was founded later in 1998 using $30 million from the firm’s winnings.
The foundation originally focused on a variety of issues affecting children, including housing and social justice. But Ciresi said that they quickly realized: “Really, the key is education.”
“We didn’t want where somebody came from, or who their parents were, or anything else to impact whether or not they would have the opportunity to reach the full measure of their potential, and we saw education as the key to that,” Ciresi said.
Ciresi grew up in a working-class St. Paul family, and his mother died of breast cancer when he was 12. He credited the eight years he spent at St. Thomas Academy and what was then the College of St. Thomas with building upon the moral foundations his parents had instilled.
“It’s not just getting an education — you know, the books, chemistry, biology, math, etc. — there’s the quality of ethical values that is embedded in you and … it is the difference-maker for me that makes St. Thomas so unique, and that’s what I hope these young people get,” Ciresi said.
The foundation began the Ciresi Walburn Leadership Fellows program at St. Thomas in 2022. The CWLF provides students up to $70,000 in scholarships over four years at St. Thomas and helps them find an internship or research project for the summer after their junior year.
This year’s $82 million gift will expand the CWLF and ensure its long-term future, according to a university press release. The Ciresi Walburn Foundation and Ciresi and his wife’s separate Michael V. and Ann C. Ciresi Foundation contributed jointly.
The 2026 donation will also establish the Ciresi Walburn Center for Leadership and the Ciresi Walburn Center for First-Generation College Students at St. Thomas, which aim to reinforce support for disadvantaged students.
Walburn said that seeing the CWLF program’s first cohort graduate in May reinforced why their contribution is needed.
“They’re going to go out and do great things — and you do great things in many small ways, and I think that’s what you learn at St. Thomas,” Walburn said. “You don’t have to be the greatest lawyer, or the greatest physician, or the greatest politician, or the greatest businessperson, or anything else. There’s great things you can do in your everyday life in helping other people to make this a better world.”
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
