A San Diego Family Aims to Strengthen Community on Both Sides of the Border

Malin and Roberta Burnham (3rd and 4th from the right) and Family.

San Diego native Malin Burnham has done a lot in his 95 years. He’s a veteran real estate mogul, champion sailor, published author and a philanthropist who has given away upward of $100 million. And he’s still active in business, heading to the office almost daily.

In the spring, Burnham and his wife Roberta passed another milestone, announcing their largest charitable donation yet to a single organization. And it’s no ordinary gift, either. The $20 million donation went to the Burnham Center for Community Advancement (BCCA), a “think and do tank” the couple founded in 2021 in the hopes of spurring civic engagement and collaboration in the San Diego area. Notably, BCCA aims to crowdsource solutions to the region’s most pressing problems on both sides of the border — meaning not just San Diego in the United States, but Tijuana, Mexico.

The San Diego-Tijuana region is one of the largest binational metropolitan areas in the world, with a combined population of some 5 million people. The even larger “CaliBaja” region has over 6 million people between San Diego and Imperial counties, and Tijuana and Mexicali.

Tad Parzen, Burnham Center for Community Advancement president and CEO, says that the center is a culmination of the Burnham family’s philanthropy, which spans multiple decades and generations. Malin and Roberta Burnham established their family foundation in the 1980s, and continue to give in areas like education, community development and the arts, with an eye toward San Diego. Like many other families we’ve profiled, including the billionaire Perez family, different family members drive different philanthropic interests.

But how did Burnham giving, which started modestly in San Diego, evolve to become a multigenerational affair involving not only Southern California, but also Baja California? We recently connected with Malin Burnham, daughter Cathe Burnham and grandson Keith Jones to find out. In our conversation, I found out more about the early days of family giving, how the second and third generations became involved, and the family’s center for community advancement in the region.

A San Diego start

Malin Burnham was born in San Diego in 1927 and was raised in Point Loma, a seaside community within city limits. He took an interest in competitive sailing, and at 17, and became the youngest skipper ever to win a world championship in the International Star Class. Burnham continued sailing at Stanford and later, helped bring the America’s Cup to San Diego, in 1987.

After graduating with a B.S. in industrial engineering in 1949, he joined John Burnham & Co. Insurance and Burnham Real Estate. Founded in 1891, Burnham Real Estate grew to become one of the region's largest and most diversified full-service real estate companies, with offices in San Diego County, Riverside County/Temecula and Las Vegas. Burnham was chairman of the company until it was acquired by Cushman & Wakefield in 2008.

As Burnham rose in his career, he and the family started to think more about giving back to his community. As he puts it, “We were interested in helping, a lot more than any emphasis we put on wealth. There’s a lot more in life than money.”

In the 1980s, Malin and Roberta Burnham established the Burnham Family Foundation to formalize their giving. His children Cathe, John, Marybeth and Thomas are all trustees of the charity, which has given away modest sums in recent years. While some families have spoken about the value of collective giving, Burnham mentioned the power of each family member pursuing their own philanthropic interests.

“All of us have been involved in one way or another with philanthropy. We’ve done a lot of stuff individually to cover more territory,” Burnham said.

Over the years, Malin and Roberta Burnham have been steady backers of local colleges and universities, including a $2.3 million 2019 leadership gift to the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate within the University of San Diego School of Business to support scholarships, faculty, and the general mission of the center. And in 2022, the Burnhams committed a $3 million gift to support UC San Diego's first downtown campus building. For all his efforts, Burnham was named “Mr. San Diego” in 1998 and “Philanthropist of the Year” in 2000.

“Covering more territory”

Cathe Burnham got involved with the family foundation around 15 years ago. Back when she was growing up, she recalls her mother taking the family down to visit Tijuana orphanages during the 1950s and 1960s to donate crates of toys, clothes and fresh foods. These early experiences allowed her to learn more about how to serve and give. It also broadened her idea of community, which wasn’t just confined to her own backyard or the American side of the border.

Drawn to the arts, she eventually received a visual arts degree from UC San Diego. She serves on the board of Installation Gallery in La Jolla, a nonprofit started three decades ago that works for collaborative arts partnerships in the San Diego-Tijuana region — commissioning art in public spaces, education and community outreach programs, and residencies for curators and artists.

Installation Gallery helped spearhead the original San Diego Artwalk as well as a number of other public events in the arts. These binational events have involved Mexican artists coming up to San Diego, and San Diego arts going across the border to Tijuana to engage in installation work. “That was 35 or 36 years ago, and I’m proud to still be active on that board,” Cathe Burnham said.

She’s also involved with the Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park, the only free museum in San Diego. Because of its endowment, leadership has been able to fund an arts program in juvenile halls, as well as go into senior home care facilities and teach art history lessons. Cathe Burnham earned an M.A. in nonprofit leadership, leaning into the idea that nonprofits are a powerful way to change culture.

Her son Keith Jones serves as managing director and owner of ACE Parking in San Diego, which manages over 1,250 locations. On the philanthropic front, he credits his grandfather Malin Burnham with teaching him the value of flying under the radar and working as a team. “You can’t really do anything majorly impactful by yourself. It takes a team effort,” Jones said. One of Jones’ focuses has been on challenging the business community to be a force for good. ACE runs an annual campaign to fight cancer and other diseases called PARK FOR PINK, supporting organizations like Sisters Network, Inc., American Cancer Society, Alzheimer's Association, Lymphoma & Leukemia Society and Susan G. Komen.

Though he’s not directly involved with the family foundation, he says that the legacy of philanthropy started by his grandfather still looms large. “Individually, we have wealth and business we can lean on. How are we using these various assets to be involved in our community to make it better? Never criticize something, Malin reminded me, unless you have a better idea yourself,” Jones said.

A book and a think tank

Malin Burnham first learned how to sail when he was 10 years old and his parents joined a yacht club. One of the first lessons he learned was self-confidence.

“When anyone first gets into a sailboat for the first time with no paddle and no engine, you have to be confident you can get back,” he said. And as he dug further into competitive sailing, he learned the value of working collectively as a team. “Maybe the skipper gets all the credit, just like a businessman gets his name on the plaque. But everyone on the crew, or the team, is equally important.”

These lessons and more are cited in Malin Burnham’s 2016 book, “Community Before Self: Seventy Years of Making Waves.” And when Malin Burnham gifted funds toward the construction of the new San Diego Yacht Club Junior Sailing Center, he stipulated that a list of “Virtues of Excellence” be permanently attached to the building.

It is this spirit of collaboration that led to the couple’s $20 million gift to create the Burnham Center for Community Advancement. “We’re not much different than most cities in America. There’s homelessness. And then there’s wealth. I’m looking at the community’s needs and we are inviting people to come up with ideas,” Malin Burnham said.

BCCA’s board is made up of nine local San Diego leaders including Kirby Brady, chief innovation officer and director of performance and analytics for the City of San Diego, and Peter Ellsworth, a longtime lawyer and healthcare executive who later ran a foundation. President and CEO Tad Parzen spearheaded the BCCA slogan, “good ideas are not enough,” and made sure to staff its board with proven leaders in the community. But BCCA also reached out to San Diego citizens to establish an advisory council. They put out a call on the internet and within 72 hours, had 90 people who wanted to help, a number that was whittled down to around two dozen.

“We asked them ‘what should we be looking for in the community?’” Burnham said. The organization also hosts community dialogues on its topics of interest to gather new ideas and diverse perspectives in the region.

So far, BCCA has several early priorities, including bolstering Balboa Park, the city’s flagship park, which contains the Old Globe theater, San Diego Natural History Museum, and San Diego Museum of Art, among other such institutions. Parzens calls Balboa Park by far the city’s most productive asset; Malin Burnham, a San Diegan through and through, adds that it’s the equivalent of Central Park in New York City.

However, the regional park has an estimated $300 million to $500 million in deferred maintenance, with no plan to fund or fix it. BCCA estimates a cost of some $1 billion to transform the park into a world-class 21st Century institution and has convened Balboa Park stakeholders, conducted a national scan of governance and finance structures of other major parks in the country, and developed a set of recommendations for public consideration.

Meanwhile, Burnham Center for Community Advancement partnered with Design Forward Alliance and UC San Diego Design Lab and spearheaded a successful bid for the region encompassing San Diego and Tijuana, which were selected together as the 2024 World Design Capital. The designation is awarded every two years for a city’s effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural and environmental development. The other finalist was Moscow, which Parzen says is proof that their region has as much to offer as anywhere else in the world. “We are the younger sibling of Los Angeles in people’s minds. But we have our own character and our own assets. We have the most productive border region, and the most crossed, of anywhere in North America,” he adds.

On the Tijuana side, BCCA has also partnered with organizations like Tijuana Innovadora, a Mexico-based nonprofit civic organization, which convened an event celebrating the release of “El Tercer País” (“The Third Country), a book about the San Diego-Tijuana binational region. The event was sponsored by Malin Burnham along with other local leaders on both sides of the border, including Mexican businessman Lorenzo Berho, and Jose Galicot, president of Tijuana Innovadora.

Apart from these efforts, BCCA is also looking to tackle housing and homelessness, and revamp the San Diego Municipal Airport. Keith Jones mentions that his grandfather is taking a different approach than others patriarchs, who might be inclined to make everything about their vision. “He’s taking a radically different approach. What do the leaders of the community have to say? He wants every one of those voices to be heard. It’s not just about Malin’s dream or vision about how to leave his imprint,” Jones says.