Fred Cuny

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."

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.

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.

During these early years, Cuny made a series of observations about humanitarian operations.

He noticed how often bureaucracies prioritized their political agenda and that agencies routinely were unrealistic about what they could achieve.

He encountered corrupt local governments misusing aid, lack of coordination, poorly designed projects, incompetence among many volunteer workers and noticed that debilitating social and political systems often grew up around aid distribution.

He saw that aid was almost always too late—in part because many large aid agencies were ponderous and hide-bound by past habits—and that it was often "junk aid," food or material sent because it was available, not necessarily what was needed.

He assumed initiatives should build on the interests and perceived needs of the affected population instead of assuming that material aid should be imported.

These observations contributed to his determination to change the system.

Cuny was typically unconstrained in his criticism of the humanitarian community status quo, including US government agencies, UN organizations and NGOs.

But since Intertect, his consulting company, was wholly dependent on outside contracts, these entities often included the same people upon whom his livelihood depended.

Even though Cuny's career was not segmented by disaster type, the following subsections group general categories of emergencies as examples of some of his most important accomplishments.

Cuny was involved in various capacities in dozens of natural disasters.

Typical projects included comprehensive needs assessments after disasters, analysis of emergency relief capabilities, pilot projects of housing reconstruction approaches and other reconstruction strategies.

Because of Cuny's work in East Pakistan in 1970-71 for Oxfam, the NGO called upon him again after the earthquake near Managua, Nicaragua in 1972.

Oxfam asked him to plan a camp for the earthquake survivors.

This was his first use of shelter units forming a cluster around a common space to encourage community interaction, mutual support and security, as opposed to the military model of tents in a grid of straight rows.