Our History:

The Foundation’s Origins

From a Hilltop Vision To an Historic Victory Against Big Tobacco

“To paraphrase General Patton, the way we won these cases was not by spending all of [our] money, but by making the other son-of-a-bitch spend all of his.”

The challenge for Ciresi and Walburn could not have been more formidable. But if successful, their shots would count.

The two were kindred spirits.

Ciresi had grown up in a working-class neighborhood of St. Paul. His mother died when he was young. His father spoke with an Italian accent and worked peddling fruit, later opening a grocery store in St. Paul and then a liquor store in White Bear Lake. In school, the elder Ciresi had not advanced past seventh grade. But he believed in education for his kids and also infused them with a deep sense of compassion. Young Ciresi enrolled in the College of St. Thomas, where he was an undersized football player. He went on to earn his law degree from the University of Minnesota and began working with attorney Solly Robins, who headed a gritty law practice that later became Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P.

Walburn had grown up in New Jersey and western New York, the daughter of an accountant and a high school English teacher. After college, she moved to Minnesota for a reporting job at the Minneapolis Tribune, honing a tenacity for digging out truths and an affinity for the underdog. After a few years, she returned to school for a law degree at the University of Minnesota, attending classes by day and continuing to work nights and weekends at the newspaper.

The two met when Ciresi appeared in court before a federal judge for whom Walburn, newly graduated from law school, was clerking. They began working together in 1985 and quickly developed a deep bond, complementing each other’s strengths, matching each other’s intensity, and sharing a zest for the righteous fight.

The IUD litigation had been fierce. But they were ready for a bigger challenge.

The idea of taking on the tobacco industry took root on that trip to California. Ciresi and Walburn were willing to bet on themselves. But they didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, only to meet the same fate. On and off over the next few years, they set out to learn all they could about the tobacco industry and the previous decades of ill-fated litigation. Over time, they reimagined the litigation with a new strategy:

• Instead of representing individual smokers, their clients would be two entities that had paid billions of dollars to treat smoking-caused disease—the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota—and they would sue to recoup their losses. This immediately changed the dynamics of the litigation and exponentially increased the financial exposure of the tobacco companies. It also eliminated one of the industry’s key defenses, which had been to blame smokers for causing their own illnesses. The irony of this defense seemed obvious, with the tobacco companies blaming their own customers for using their products as intended (i.e., smoking cigarettes). But with the best attorneys money could buy, this strategy had been astoundingly successful. Now, however, this defense would be dismantled, with smokers no longer in the equation as plaintiffs.

• Instead of focusing on the product itself, which was deadly but legal (when sold to adults), they would focus on the industry’s wrongful conduct: an industry-wide conspiracy to misrepresent and suppress the dangers of smoking—denying cigarettes caused harm and were addictive—and marketing to minors. This put Minnesota’s strong consumer fraud and antitrust statutes at the core of the case.

• Finally, they would prove their fraud case by using the words of the tobacco companies themselves. Their instincts led them to believe there was a treasure trove of hidden documents that would reveal the industry’s knowledge of their deadly and addictive product. Ciresi and Walburn planned to undertake a massive effort to unearth these documents, many of which had been secreted for decades.

Suit was filed in Ramsey County District Court in August 1994.

This was a contingent-fee case. The Robins law firm would front tens of millions of dollars in attorney time and out-of-pocket expenses. If Ciresi and Walburn failed to win—as had all attorneys in the preceding decades—they would recover nothing. Suffice it to say, this was not a universally popular decision among their colleagues. Some partners left the firm, fearful of its financial future.

True to history, the litigation was a David-and-Goliath struggle: Ciresi, Walburn, and a small team of a dozen lawyers and support staff against hundreds of lawyers from multiple law firms across the country representing the industry. One tobacco company alone admitted that it was spending more than $1 million—each week—on the case. (That was just one company; there were eight additional defendants.)

The pretrial proceedings lasted three-and-a-half years. During that time, the industry filed mounds of motions to knock out the case. The war of attrition also involved the industry filing eighteen interlocutory appeals, two of them to the U.S. Supreme Court and all of them unsuccessful. (A typical case has, at best, one appeal at the end of the proceedings.) The tobacco lawyers also fought tooth-and-nail against release of their internal documents. Day after day, week after week, month after month, Ciresi and Walburn and their team fought back.

Slowly, the industry ran out of options and began to turn over its internal documents. What began as a trickle eventually turned into a deluge, with thirty-five million pages ultimately produced. These would all be reviewed by the small team from the Robins firm.

The documents were explosive. Page after page revealed damning admissions: that the industry had known for decades that cigarettes were deadly and addictive but had conspired to conceal that information from the public; that tobacco was not only a naturally addictive agricultural product but that tobacco companies also manipulated the form of nicotine to keep smokers hooked; and that the industry did indeed target children with its marketing.

When the trial began in January 1998, the industry witnesses—who still maintained while testifying that it had not been proven that smoking was harmful or addictive—were forced to confront their own documents in real time before the jury. After four months of this pounding, the industry settled on May 8, 1998. The settlement called for annual payments to the state of more than an estimated $7 billion and payments to Blue Cross of $469 million. Ciresi ripped up the firm’s retainer agreement with the state, which entitled it to 25 percent of the settlement, and instead negotiated a payment of $550 million in fees to be paid directly by the tobacco industry.

In addition to the financial terms, the settlement also included a panoply of groundbreaking injunctive relief against the industry, including: disbanding the industry’s two trade groups that had been central to the industry’s conspiracy; prohibiting the targeting of children in the marketing of cigarettes; and barring the distribution of promotional items and removal of all tobacco billboards in the state. The thirty-five million pages of documents would be released to the public. The industry also publicly admitted shortly after the settlement that—as its internal documents had proven—cigarettes were deadly and addictive.

Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, noting in particular the unearthing of the secret documents, would call the Minnesota litigation “one of the most significant public health achievements of the second half of the twentieth century.”

Bold Leaders:

Skip Humphrey and Andy Czajkowski

There would have been no Minnesota tobacco litigation without the extraordinary leadership at the helm of the state and Blue Cross: Hubert H. (Skip) Humphrey III, Minnesota Attorney General, and Andy Czajkowski, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Humphrey was known for his consumer advocacy and for heading up one of the most respected Attorney General’s offices in the nation. Czajkowski had long worried about smoking’s impact on the health of Blue Cross subscribers, and his company had been the first insurer in the nation to offer discounts to nonsmokers.

This public-private partnership, teamed with the Robins law firm, gave the case credibility from the start. But it wasn’t easy for either client.

Blue Cross of Minnesota was the only Blue Cross organization in the nation to muster the courage to take on the tobacco industry. Even Czajkowski’s own board was skeptical. “A lot of people thought we were foolish and that the industry would find ways to take retribution against us,” Czajkowski said, “but this was the right thing to do.”

For Humphrey, tobacco’s harmful impact had hit close to home. He suspected that smoking contributed to the bladder cancer that killed his famous father, former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. As for his own political ambitions, Humphrey brushed aside arguments that tobacco’s powerful lobbyists would damage his chances for higher office. “This is the right direction,” he said.

The litigation also pitted Humphrey against Attorneys General from other states, normally allied with him. Eventually, most other states filed copycat tobacco lawsuits and, not willing to embark on a serious litigation effort, looked to a sweetheart national settlement with the industry. Among other things, this proposed settlement would have short-circuited the ongoing document discovery in Minnesota. But such a deal required unanimity among the states, and Humphrey refused to bend.

“We were all alone,” he said, recalling meetings where he was ostracized by his fellow AGs. “We wanted to get the truth out. The money was one thing. But the truth was more important.”

Years later, Ciresi summed up his clients’ fortitude and resolve. “Skip and Andy stood like oak trees,” he said.

The Tobacco Industry’s Document Indexes

One of the biggest discovery fights in the tobacco litigation was over production of what became known as the industry’s “4A indexes,” named after a paragraph in a trial court order. This term would come to be used worldwide once the significance of these indexes became known.

At the outset of the litigation, Ciresi and Walburn guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that industry lawyers, with all the years of prior litigation and unlimited resources, would have collected and indexed many of the secret internal documents, even if never produced to plaintiffs’ lawyers. Production of the indexes, Ciresi and Walburn believed, would be a critical aid in identifying the key underlying documents to target for production.

At first, the industry represented that it had no document “indexes.” For months, industry lawyers—with straight faces—denied they had “indexes” because, as was later revealed, they called them “databases.” (This was one of countless word games in the discovery process.) More arguments and gamesmanship followed. In the end, the battle took sixteen months, eight trial court orders, and industry appeals up to the U.S. Supreme Court before the indexes were produced.

These turned out to be the motherlode, so detailed and extensive that one company alone had spent $90 million to create its index. Then-President Bill Clinton took note, calling the 4A indexes “the tobacco industry’s road map to its own documents that will significantly improve the ability of public health experts, scientists, state and federal officials, and the public to gain important health information.”

A Foundation Is Born

A National Exemplar for Law Firms

After settlement of the tobacco litigation, Ciresi, then chair of the Robins firm, looked for ways to give back to the community and, in particular, to advance the cause of children in the state. Protecting children who had been targeted by tobacco companies’ marketing efforts was, after all, one of the focal points of the litigation. And, of course, there was perhaps no better test of the moral fiber of society than its commitment to ensuring that all children, no matter the circumstances of their birth, have a fair opportunity to fulfill their potentials.

A new foundation would provide a means to make a significant and lasting contribution to this objective.

Accordingly, Ciresi asked a colleague, John Eisberg, to explore ideas and the logistics for starting a foundation and, since this would be a novel undertaking for a group of lawyers, to determine the best-suited Minnesota foundation with which to partner. Eisberg came back with a definitive answer: the best match was The Minneapolis Foundation (TMF).

The announcement was made in October 1998 with establishment of the Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi Foundation for Education, Public Health and Social Justice. (Ciresi would later leave the Robins firm and establish a smaller firm, after which the independent Foundation board voted unanimously in 2013 to change its name to the Ciresi Walburn Foundation.) The Foundation was to be endowed with $30 million from the law firm’s fees in the tobacco litigation, the largest gift ever from a law firm to a community foundation, according to TMF.

“This sets a new standard for the charitable giving of law firms across the nation,” said Emmett Carson, then-president of TMF.

TMF would provide staffing for the Foundation, but recruiting a board was an early task. Although the Foundation was associated with the law firm by virtue of its endowment, it was established as a standalone nonprofit and required its own board. Ciresi wanted prominent people with experience in the community and in philanthropy to provide gravitas. He also hoped board members would share the impassioned spirit of the tobacco team.

Aside from Ciresi, Eisberg, and Carson, the first board included James Shannon, former president of the University of St. Thomas; Michael O’Connell, rector of the Basilica of St. Mary’s; John B. Davis, former president of Macalester College; and Robins attorneys Deborah Palmer, Kathleen Flynn Peterson, and A. James Anderson. Walburn would join the board after she returned from stints in Washington D.C. (working on the U.S. Department of Justice’s RICO case against the tobacco industry, which built off Minnesota’s case and documents), and in Geneva, Switzerland (consulting on the World Health Organization’s establishment of a worldwide tobacco control treaty). Subsequent board members have also matched the stature of the originals.

The board is unique.

Unlike many nonprofits, the board of the Foundation, because of its endowment, is not saddled with the chore of fundraising. This allows for extended time at board meetings to probe deeply into issues. The Foundation also does not have term limits for board members; although there has been turnover through the years, some have served for the full twenty-five years (and counting). This has fostered rooted and trusting relationships among board members, which, in turn, encourages brutal honesty when addressing the difficult issues facing the community.

“Every voice is heard, and in real depth,” said Carolyn Smallwood, CEO of Way to Grow, who was named to the board in 2013. “No one’s afraid to bring up anything.”

Another board member, Louis King II, president and CEO of OIC of America, said that too often “affluent people are totally detached from people living under the reality of injustice,” but that people like Ciresi and Walburn are different. “They are warriors for a just cause,” he said.

Board members serve without pay, while contributing significant time and energy to meetings and other activities. There are five formal board meetings each year, often with speakers and presentations from grantees and community leaders to facilitate extended exploration of the issues at hand.

Eventually, the board determined that the Foundation was ready to spread its wings and leave the auspices of The Minneapolis Foundation. That had been a fruitful partnership, but the board believed it was time for the Foundation to embark on its own course. “It was time to fly on our own,” said Walburn. “We wanted more flexibility, and we wanted to embrace our edgier side.”

The transition took place in 2020, when the Foundation hired Daniel Sellers as its first executive director (and only paid staff person).

Sellers was well known to Ciresi and Walburn and the rest of the board from his job as founder and head of EdAllies, a nonprofit education advocacy organization. (Sellers is a Twin Cities native whose first job after college was with Teach for America, working in a sixth-grade classroom in a low-income, Black-majority county in North Carolina; his students achieved a stunning a 97 percent proficiency on standardized tests, and Sellers was named a finalist for Teach for America’s 2008 National Teacher of the Year award.)

“Daniel is the consummate policy wonk but also a superb strategist and has the ability to implement programs,” said Walburn. “He has a big heart and a critical eye. He wants to change the world, but he also cares about investing carefully in organizations that would be good opportunities for us.”

Throughout the years, and the various organizational changes, the constant has been recognition of the importance of strong governance and staffing (lean can be powerful), which allows for maximizing the Foundation’s commitment to its mission.

Board Members*

Present

• Michael V. Ciresi, attorney

• Roberta B. Walburn, attorney

• Doris Baylor,  civic leader and business owner

• John F. Eisberg, attorney

• Louis J. King II, CEO, Summit Academy OIC and OIC of America

• Michael J. O’Connell, civic leader and former rector of the Basilica of St. Mary’s

• Gloria Perez, president and CEO, Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, former president and CEO of Jeremiah Program

• Carolyn Smallwood, CEO, Way to Grow 

• Rob Vischer, president, University of St. Thomas

Past

• A. James Anderson, attorney

• Emmett D. Carson, CEO, The Minneapolis Foundation

• John B. Davis, former president, Macalester College

• Rev. Albert Gallmon, Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church

• Elliot S. Kaplan, attorney

• Maureen Kucera-Walsh, civic leader

• Deborah J. Palmer, attorney

• Kathleen Flynn Peterson, attorney

• James P. Shannon, former president, University of St. Thomas

• Dr. Julie Sullivan, president, University of St. Thomas

• Sandra L. Vargas, president and CEO, The Minneapolis Foundation

• Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman, Temple Israel

* Descriptors relate to dates members joined and served on the board