Frederick C. Cuny (November 14, 1944 – disappeared April 15, 1995) was an American humanitarian whose work spanned disaster relief, refugee emergency management, recovery from war and civil conflict as well as disaster and emergency preparedness, mitigation and peacebuilding. He was first and foremost a practitioner, but also a prolific author, an educator and a field-based researcher. He has been described as “a great American – a sort of universal Schindler, a man with lists of millions of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe whose lives he succored or saved.” Another tribute to Cuny claimed that he “was one of the world’s most accomplished disaster relief experts, both a pioneer and an iconoclast in the field of international humanitarian aid.”
Early life
Frederick Charles Cuny was born in New Haven, Connecticut. The family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and later to Dallas, Texas, when Cuny was eight, where he grew up during the early stages of the Vietnam War. He dreamed of becoming a Marine combat pilot and obtained a pilot license while still in high school. He enrolled in the military cadet program at Texas A&M University, left before graduating, and later transferred to Texas College of Arts and Industries in Kingsville. While at Kingsville, he became interested in humanitarian work after visiting low-income neighborhoods in Mexico and witnessing the plight of immigrant farm workers living in South Texas. He later attended the University of Houston where he studied urban planning and received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1967.
After graduation, he worked in the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas, on the Mexican border in a project funded under President Johnson's War on Poverty. There he developed solutions to long-standing infrastructure and public health problems. Essential to Cuny's success was his approach to grassroots participation, which later became a defining feature of his approach to humanitarian aid projects.
After Eagle Pass, "Fred" (as he was called by all who knew him) worked with the Carter and Burgess Engineering firm in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was assigned to the massive construction project of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Perhaps because of this experience, Cuny was often referred to as an engineer, though he had little formal engineering training. Nevertheless, his understanding of many engineering principles, his approach to planning by identifying specific problems and devising simple, practical solutions to them lent credibility to the assumption that he was an engineer.
Work in humanitarian assistance
In 1969, Cuny experienced his first international humanitarian crisis when he traveled to Biafra, the region attempting to secede from Nigeria. “Biafra was where we first came to grips with dealing with famines, and the different ways of dealing with them—either food aid or market interventions.” Cuny observed the Nigerian government using food aid as a weapon of war, as well as the need for a more rational approach to humanitarian assistance.
After Biafra, Cuny established Intertect, a small private company dedicated to providing technical assistance, mainly to voluntary agencies (now referred to as Non-Governmental Organizations or NGOs), the US Government, and United Nations organizations. He worked as a freelance consultant, a role he played the rest of his life. From his earliest endeavors, Cuny partnered with Jean (Jinx) Parker, who became the bedrock for Cuny's Dallas office, contributing to his writings and operations and providing a home base for Cuny's far flung initiatives.
In 1970, one of the most destructive cyclones in history struck East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), killing some 300,000 people and leaving millions more homeless. The disaster was compounded several weeks later when civil war displaced 10 million East Pakistanis. Cuny was hired by the British NGO, Oxfam, to serve as an advisor in East Pakistan. He later described this assignment as life changing because it was there that he was first fully immersed in the vast, often dysfunctional machinery of the international disaster relief system, an array of international organizations, governmental agencies and NGOs.