ERIC KLEIN
Eric Klein doesn’t fit the charity mold—and he has no interest in pretending he does. As founder and CEO of CAN-DO, he has spent the last two decades calling out the red tape, greed, and incompetence that plague the “relief industry,” and replacing it with something radically simple: common sense, transparency, and results you can actually see.
In 2004, Klein was hit by a drunk driver and woke up upside down in the front seat of a totaled 1967 Mustang. The accident handed him an insurance settlement, and made Klein reevaluate his career path. Instead of rebuilding his old life, he used that money to fly to Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami—just him, a friend, a camera, and a rough plan to see “what 10 grand and 10 days” could really do on the ground. Three months later, after spending over $55,000 of his own settlement, he had helped clear miles of destroyed coastline, filled disease-ridden cesspools, rebuilt local businesses, repaired fishing boats, dug wells, built playgrounds, and hired teams of local survivors to do the work.
He also saw, up close, just how bad the system was. Billions had been donated; bodies were still unburied, debris untouched, families sleeping on slabs. Klein watched big-name organizations roll in for the photo ops, stage “aid drops” for the cameras, and disappear. That was the moment he stopped accepting “red tape” as an answer and started calling it what it was: greed, incompetence, and corruption hiding behind a logo.
Out of that anger—and those field lessons—CAN-DO was born.
Since 2004, under Klein’s leadership, CAN-DO has completed hundreds of disaster-relief and community-revitalization projects across the United States and around the world. The model is straightforward and unapologetically anti-bureaucratic: hire locals, deploy U.S. military veterans, listen to the people actually living through the crisis, move fast and efficiently From clearing homes and distributing food, water, and medical supplies to rebuilding small businesses and standing up full-scale distribution hubs in forgotten communities, CAN-DO is built to deliver impact—not excuses.
Klein is equally relentless about accountability. CAN-DO runs on a “no-BS” transparency model: donors get direct access to project bank statements, real-time updates from the field, live video streams, and completion reports. No vague totals. No feel-good fluff. Just proof of where the money went and who it helped. Klein likes to joke that CAN-DO is the only organization that “goes broke” after every disaster—because they burn every dime on the mission, not on overhead or optics.
For his work, Klein has been awarded a Global Compassion Award at the United Nations, named a “Hero of Haiti,” and honored by his hometown in Massachusetts as a Legendary Local of Salem—an archive reserved for individuals whose impact is expected to resonate through the town’s history. He has been featured on The TODAY Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN, FOX, CBS, People Magazine and more. In 2008, Oprah Winfrey selected him as a contestant on ABC’s primetime series Oprah’s Big Give, showcasing “unknown” philanthropists who were reshaping what real giving looks like.
Klein is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University and resides in Los Angeles, where he continues to do what he’s always done: fight bullies, speak truth to power, and prove that one person—with a little money, a lot of common sense, and zero tolerance for bullshit—can help change how the world does disaster relief.