Malin Burnham is the most important man in this town,” says George Mitrovich, president of the nonprofit City Club of San Diego.

Geez, Burnham’s friends won’t let him live that down. “Burnham must have given Mitrovich a nickel,” they’ll tease.

Nonetheless, Mitrovich, who’s often quick with praise for good people, chooses his superlatives carefully and didn’t qualify his observation.

“The thing about Malin, which is extraordinary, is his commitment to the whole of our city, not just one dimension of the city,” says Mitrovich. “And here’s a man who has enough money he doesn’t have to work another day in his life. I don’t have a lot of heroes, but Malin Burnham is one.”

Among Mitrovich’s other heroes are Jack and Bobby Kennedy, for whom he used to work. So it’s an amusing coincidence that Burnham resembles a Kennedy, so much so that his wife Roberta has been asked more than once by unknowing acquaintances visiting their home “what my fixation with the Kennedys is all about,” she laughs. “Those pictures are Malin.”

His buddies can tease, but Burnham enjoys so much credibility and gets so much attention because he works at good deeds, including difficult ones, not necessarily because he throws money at good causes.

Indeed, he apparently doesn’t have that much money, not like John Moores, Helen Copley or the late Joan Kroc, who ranked on Forbes’ latest list of America’s wealthiest.

Burnham, 76, declines to specify his net worth or that of his Burnham Foundation, except to say that the latter is worth “in excess of $10 million.”

Regardless, one needn’t be super-wealthy to co-chair UCSD’s $1 billion capital campaign, as Burnham does with co-chairs Irwin Jacobs and John Moores, who are super-wealthy. One merely needs to be willing to raise $1 billion, which takes work, and they’ve raised half that already. Burnham has pledged $5 million of his own dough.

Burnham also co-chairs with restaurateur Tom Fat and UCSD Chancellor Marsha Chandler the gala dinner committee for a world-class event, the Kyoto Laureate Symposium to be hosted again in March by the University of San Diego. In a 75-minute luncheon meeting at China Camp on Nov. 18, Burnham managed to triple the amount of scholarship money available from the Kyoto Laureate event to deserving freshmen (without dipping into his own pocket), and persuaded this rare audience of San Diego’s university and college presidents that the Kyoto Laureate Symposium must be embraced as a San Diego celebration of higher education and accomplishment, not just a USD plum, otherwise the entire program may be lost to some other region.

Burnham also co-chairs with hotelier Bob Payne and SDSU’s Hal Brown the Community Leaders Undoing Biases (CLUB), which seeks to unmask and end racism in San Diego.

Burnham also co-chairs with Mitrovich the long-term effort to establish a “strong mayor” form of city government for San Diego. He also spearheaded the 6 1/2-year effort to establish the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.

Burnham also chairs the Burnham Institute, the former La Jolla Cancer Research Institute on Torrey Pines Mesa where he’s donated and pledged millions of dollars.

Burnham is the man who’s introducing Metropolitan Water District CEO Ron Gastelum to San Diego civic leaders at a dinner in early December, a peace-making effort following MWD’s long war with the San Diego County Water Authority.

Burnham chairs this. Burnham chairs that. The man’s busier than Santa on Christmas Eve. Oh, and did you hear he’s organizing the Olympics in San Diego and Tijuana in 2016?

And did you notice, in most cases, Burnham’s donating his time rather than his money?

“It is important that everybody gets involved in philanthropy,” says Burnham. “I like to think that philanthropy has three major components, the act of giving, the act of receiving and the act of working for that organization, either as a professional or lay person, board member, committee member, volunteer, that sort of thing. Any one of those is philanthropy. So even the person making $40,000 a year can certainly get involved in his or her church or helping some charity paint their building on some Saturday. It’s terribly important.

“There are also three major components of our society, government, business and the nonprofit world. Increasingly, by my readings of Peter Drucker and many other gurus, it’s obvious that the nonprofit sector is getting more important in our society. The reason is government continues to fail us in great measure, and the business community cannot do all of this by itself. So there is much more leadership today than ever before involved in the nonprofit world, of which, charity and philanthropy are big parts. It is incumbent upon all citizens to take part.”

Aside from sleeping at night and spending about 40 percent of his time out of town traveling, yachting or relaxing with family at retreats in Cabo San Lucas or Deer Valley, Utah, Burnham organized his philanthropy in 1981 by applying routine discipline.

The Burnham Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, “was set up with assets of Roberta and mine to be our mechanism to do our philanthropy,” he says. “We decided over 20 years ago we wanted to give more of our assets away, to be more community citizens, and we needed not just a vehicle but to build a discipline.

“It turned out to be more advantageous for us than anticipated. Once you give away assets to a foundation, you then have to manage those not only in accordance with IRS rules, but it is incumbent to do it on a sustainable basis, which means a regular basis, which means it’s more of a job to give away one’s money. There’s a lot of planning and investing of those assets.”

He says the Burnham Foundation imposes a discipline of steady giving from year to year, rather than reducing or eliminating its donations during downturns in the economy.

“That has been a wonderful way for us. There are other ways of doing this, by setting up funds at The San Diego Foundation, for instance, or other vehicles. This is the way we did it. It’s freestanding, not associated with The San Diego Foundation. I am president of the foundation. Roberta is vice president. The foundation has never had employees. I have the benefit and the gift of Burnham Real Estate Services’ accounting department and secretarial help and other administrative abilities that also are contributed to the foundation. The quid pro quo is that many things that the foundation supports are in the name of, or at the request of, the Burnham Real Estate Services team and also on a parallel basis, John Burnham Insurance Services.”

Burnham still chairs, but does not operate, those companies that he sold to employees in 1986. John Burnham Insurance re-sold a year ago to Union Bank of California, and so Burnham suspects he won’t be chairing insurance company board meetings much longer.

In recent years, the Burnham Foundation has distributed about $500,000 a year, about half to the Burnham Institute and more recently half to UCSD. Recipients other than the two biggies often receive matching funds out of Malin and Roberta’s own pockets. He counts about 40 lesser beneficiaries, ranging from donations of $2,000 to $25,000.

“I have taken care of my children adequately, in the opinion of Roberta and me. They’ll get an adequate amount of our estate. On the other hand, I do feel a need and obligation in the philanthropic world. Therefore, I’ve already given a substantial portion of my estate away.” He estimates about 40 percent of his maximum estate has been donated.

“The Burnham Institute and UCSD are the epitome of where Roberta and I have have our main interests, in health care and sciences, plus education. I’m as interested in K-through-12 as I am in higher education. (Burnham has led campaigns to elect trustees of the San Diego Unified School District.)

“There are of course many choices in those fields. We don’t attempt to cover too many. About seven or eight years ago Roberta and I decided we should concentrate on one or two major efforts, as opposed to a whole bunch of smaller efforts, although we can and do participate with several recipients in a major sense, helping them with their needs, not just with our (money), but our ideas, participation, organizational skills, Rolodex, watching their progress and enjoying their success, rather than doing what many other people do, not giving away anything while they’re vertical and only giving it away when they’re horizontal.

“Most of the things we’ve supported are in San Diego County. We’ve enjoyed the YMCA countywide, the San Diego Hall of Champions, the United Way.” Outside of town, the Burnhams have been most generous with his alma mater, Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering.

“For the last 25 years, I think my greatest strength has been trying to look out over the horizon and recognizing the needs and important issues that are going to be in front of us, and trying to figure out solutions as quickly as possible, and designing a program that I can turn over to other people. I’m not very good at sitting in committees every Tuesday morning of my life, or anything of a routine nature. I’m much better off at the front end, getting them started and turning them over.

“On this Kyoto Laureate Symposium, I had no idea of its magnitude on an international basis, and here we (San Diegans) have had our hands around part of that. I was led to believe if we didn’t do a much better job, the Kyoto Prize organizers would lose San Diego as a venue. So I immediately jumped in with both feet and some ideas, which everyone seemed to welcome, and hopefully we’ll solidify its exposure and San Diego will remain a permanent venue. When that happens, I’m out of there and onto something else.

“Not to be boasting, but my skills are in the up-front areas of these things. I went and visited Irwin Jacobs and I told him I was giving him the first exclusive presentation to have this title sponsorship (of the Kyoto Laureate Symposium dinner), and he said he’d like to do that and they’d get back to us, and they did.” So, for $25,000, Qualcomm will become the title sponsor of the Kyoto Laureate dinner in March 2004.

Burnham says he’s spent only about 15 hours on the Kyoto Laureate Symposium, enlisting Marsha Chandler at UCSD, enlisting Jacobs and Qualcomm, raising scholarship levels, and rallying educational leaders throughout the county.

Oh, one more thing about the much maligned George Mitrovich, a philanthropist who hasn’t much money at all, but who gives enormous time trying to do good deeds. “I’ve never known anyone more community-minded than George, nor someone who can deal better with people on a very high plane or with people from every walk of life,” says Burnham. “He has a quality group of contacts around the country that’s amazing to me. And he’s very gifted with words. And he’s not my best friend.”