The family moves to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and later to Dallas, Texas when Cuny is eight, where he grows up during the early stages of the VietNam War. He dreams of becoming a Marine combat pilot and obtains a pilot license while still in high school.

Between his Freshman and Sophomore year, when he is not attending a Marine camp in Quantico, Virginia, Fred works on a cargo freighter in Central and South America. This is his first taste of the Third World and the first time Fred sees that everyone does not live in comfortable suburbs such as the one where he grew up.

Fred marries Beth in a small ceremony in Kingsville. Brandan Craig Cuny, his only child, is born the same year. The family then moves to Houston and Fred enrolls at the University of Houston.

After graduation, Fred works in the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas on the Mexican border in a project funded under President Johnson's War on Poverty. As the "coordinator of community resources," it was Cuny's first hands-on chance at organizing and motivating people to take matters into their own hands. There he developed solutions to long-standing infrastructure and public health problems.

After Biafra, Cuny establishes Intertect, a small private company dedicated to providing technical assistance, mainly to voluntary agencies, NGOs, the US Government, and United Nations organizations. The same year, Cuny is hired by Oxfam to serve as an advisor in East Pakistan (now Bangaldesh) following a cylone that killed some 300,000 people and displaced 10 million East Pakistanis. 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.

Following an extremely destructive earthquake in Guatemala, which destroyed ~258,000 houses and left 1.2 million people homeless, Oxfam again asks Cuny to conceptualize a strategy for housing reconstruction. His response is a novel approach called "Programa Kuchuba'l." In it, Cuny incorporates a high degree of citizen participation at all levels and includes an educational component for both the general public and local builders, with the goal of 'building back better.'

Cuny responds to the Ethiopian refugee crisis in Somalia.

Cuny begins working with the U.S. Bureau of Refugee Programs in Lebanon advising on how to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees. He also becomes the co-founder of the University of Wisconsin Disaster Management Center and makes major contributions to the development of the curriculum and content of several courses.

With the famine crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, Fred is called to the Sudan to oversee the running of the burgeoning refugee camps, caused by a massive immigration from Ethiopia. During this time, Cuny conducted assessments of famine victims who had fled to Sudan from areas of Ethiopia that were affected by protracted drought, war and famine.

Following an earthquake in El Salvador that left over 200,000 people homeless the United States Agency for International Development/ Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) hires Cuny to help. He devises a unique 'big-picture' approach to recovery, that is centered on the El Salvador government purchasing under-utilized land and building multi-family housing for disaster survivors who had been renters and squatters, a population usually overlooked by external aid organizations. The same year, Cuny also leads an inter-agency assessment of food needs inside Ethiopia adding in new measurements to examine dependency problems and longer-term approaches to help identify different strategies for livelihoods support.

OFDA calls on Cuny and Intertect to lead assessment missions to several parts of the former Soviet Union (i.e., Georgia, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya) and they are instrumental in developing the policies and approaches that the US Government later employed in assisting the states affected by the breakup. This experience in Russia is Cuny's introduction to the region and it contributes to his interest and subsequent involvement in the region.

In response to a developing famine, Cuny travels to Somalia to assist the U.S. government in establishing food supply programs and advocates for the limited use of military assets in humanitarian aid delivery, though his recommendations are largely excluded from final planning and the intervention ultimately proves unsuccessful. During this period, Cuny and Intertect also advise on assistance for populations displaced by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, support humanitarian programming during the Sri Lankan civil war, contribute to cyclone recovery efforts in the Maldives, and advise UNDP and the government of Bangladesh on cyclone protection and management in the Meghna Delta.

Cuny and Intertect collaborate with philanthropist George Soros to support besieged Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Intertect maintains continuous teams in the city, designing and implementing food, water, and heating programs, including a modular water purification system that was strategically flown-in in pieces by C-130 aircraft and installed under siege conditions. Intertect teams also assist with humanitarian operations elsewhere in Bosnia and Croatia, including innovations in airlifted relief delivery to Sarajevo.

At George Soros's request, Cuny travels to Chechnya to assess humanitarian needs following the Russian assault on Grozny. After returning briefly to the United States, he publicly denounces the Russian campaign and publishes the article "Killing Chechnya" in the New York Review of Books. On March 31, while traveling in a Russian ambulance with two doctors and an interpreter from Ingushetia into Chechnya, Cuny and his companions are captured by unidentified Chechen forces. An international search involving the Open Society Institute, U.S. and Russian authorities, and Chechen forces follows, but after months of investigation, Cuny's family announces credible reports that Cuny and his three colleagues were executed near the village of Stary Atchkoi. Their bodies are never recovered.