Klara Cvitanovich

On March 24, 2024, at age 85, Klara Cvitanovich helped raise over $60,000 for area schools. It’s a Drago’s Seafood Restaurant fundraising tradition that she started when she was 67. Back then, in the long wake of Hurricane Katrina, Klara’s parish church and school looked like they’d never reopen. She had an idea: The restaurant that she and her husband Drago had built into an international success was closed on Sundays. Klara decided to open for lunch that Palm Sunday in 2006 and donate every dollar – 29,000 of them – to help restore and reopen the church.

She’s done Palm Sunday fundraisers ever since, expanding them to dinner and donating the proceeds to support area schools. And she’s added additional fundraisers throughout the year to aid even more schools. “Education,” she says, “is the most important thing one can have.”

Klara is Croatian, born in what was then Yugoslavia. She recalls a childhood interrupted by World War II, her home occupied and then burned. The welcome Marshall Plan food aid of cheese, eggs and milk. The entrepreneurial work ethic of her father. The generosity of one of her father’s former employees leaving bread for her family on their windowsill weekly after the war.

Lessons of generosity, learned over a lifetime, grew into an unshakeable commitment to helping her community – whether hyper-locally, feeding the hungry one by one, or internationally, collecting and delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical supplies, food and clothing to Croatia as war was tearing through her homeland in the early 1990s. She welcomed into her home refugees from both sides of the Croatian War and was even tapped by Hillary Clinton to discuss the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war.

When it comes to her commitment to helping others, the real-world examples are too numerous to list as she says humbly: “I feel in my heart that it’s my obligation that I should help more needy people.”

That. That is what we mean by Excellence Through Experience®. That’s why Peoples Health and the New Orleans Saints are proud to honor Klara Cvitanovich as a Peoples Health Champion.