After a career spanning 45 years overseas, including work in 16 countries across Africa and Asia, Friends of the Verde River Executive Director W. David Gressly, 69, has been fulfilling his original desire to be an environmentalist since he took over the helm of the Friends in December 2023.

“I grew up on a farm in rural [Bolckow] Missouri, but I grew up in a family that was interested in this country and internationally,” Gressly said, pronouncing The Show-Me State as “Missour-uh.” “My father was in the military and we were in Germany in the 1950s, so I’ve always had an international interest. But I also have family members that joined the Peace Corps when it was created in the ’60s. My great aunt and uncle were serving in India, so I had that service perspective.”

Gressly’s international career began with the Peace Corps after earning his undergraduate degree in economics with specialization in economic development in 1978 at the University of Missouri. He described the Peace Corps as a defining moment in his professional life. He served for four years in Kenya, first as a volunteer from 1978 to 1980, then as a training manager until 1982.

A disco bar in Eldoret, Kenya, in 1981 also proved to be a defining moment in his personal life. With the Bee Gees and other local favorites thumping through the speakers, Gressly spotted Cameron, who was in town taking a language class. “I have to mention The Commodores with Lionel Richie,” he said. “Because the first song that we danced to was ‘Three Times a Lady.’” Cameron would become his wife and the mother of their six children.

After his time in Kenya, Gressly earned a graduate degree in international management from Thunderbird School of International Management in Arizona in 1983. He held senior roles with the Peace Corps and UNICEF across West Africa and South Asia. He served as Peace Corps country director in Mauritania and later as director of planning and budget in Washington D.C. At UNICEF, he managed large-scale operations in Nigeria, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and India, overseeing emergency response, polio campaigns and disaster relief.

“My work took me all over. In India, I ran our portion of the world’s largest polio campaign, where I had to buy over a billion doses of vaccine every year,” Gressly said. “We ran multiple campaigns to revaccinate children several times to try to eradicate polio.

“I had never been involved in buying half the world’s supply of anything before. I learned a term in economics, ‘monopsony,’ which is the opposite of monopoly: one buyer and many suppliers. That’s what I was, a monopsony, since I controlled half the world market.”

Gressly served as the UNICEF deputy representative from 2003 to 2004 in New Delhi and helped reduce polio cases to their lowest level in history by vaccinating approximately 140 million children eight times a year.

“While the eradication took place after I left, we got it down to about 50 cases a year. I was working with WHO and various other partners, Indian partners, the Gates Foundation and others,” Gressly said. “So we were part of that larger coalition, and we did the purchasing and distribution of vaccines, but also social marketing, working with local communities that were resistant to the vaccine to find out why, and try to get voluntary agreement for vaccination.”

Gressly explained that people are logical and deserve the benefit of the doubt, especially in challenging contexts such as the two states Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India where he worked.

“Uttar Pradesh’s population is larger than Russia’s, making it a vast state by population,” Gressly said. “Bihar is also large, but both states are relatively poor and have significant marginalized groups. In particular, there are substantial Muslim communities, lower-caste Dalits, and various Scheduled Tribes. As the work progressed, it became clear that these populations were the most resistant, and therefore we started trying to find out why.

“The basic reason was that they were not getting any kind of public service. The quality of education was quite low. Clean water [was] not really available. Health care was difficult. And so they had a very simple question: ‘You’ve not been interested in us in the past. Why are you suddenly interested today, just on this one thing?’”

India provided professional lessons for him that Gressly said he carries over to his work in the Verde Valley.

“We had 4,000 people working on this in India, just in Uttar Pradesh, to talk through these issues and to see if we could find a way forward that was a way of making sure that people understood and would accept a vaccination,” Gressly said. “So it’s a question of approach, and not dismissing people as naive or ignorant or other derogatory types of things, but taking a more positive way and saying, look, let’s talk about it. What is the issue? What is the concern? Why is it a concern? Let’s take a look at this in a little more detail. Sometimes I see we’re too dismissive of that type of approach.”

The lessons of India Gressly would also use when he was appointed UN Emergency Ebola Response Coordinator in May 2019 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“We wanted to avoid anything that was compulsory, because that usually backfires. And eventually it worked, and India ultimately was able to eradicate polio — a disease that touched 350,000 children a year prior to the start of that campaign,” Gressly said. “I was just a part of it for a couple of years, so I don’t want to overly exaggerate my personal role, but it was a fascinating job.”

After Gressly left India in September 2004 he spent nearly the next seven years working for the United Nations mission in Sudan.

“All of that led to a call from New York to ask me to lead a UNICEF program in South Sudan, which was a part of Sudan, but just as civil war was ending, and there, UNICEF was leading in the coordination of all UN agencies for humanitarian delivery of assistance to the southern Sudanese,” Gressly said. “Primarily I was working on humanitarian work initially, but did a lot. We built roads. We built over 2,000 kilometers of roads and we did a lot of de-mining.

“Then it shifted to a political role as Southern Sudan moved toward elections and independence. I was asked to lead coordination for the political peacekeeping mission, supporting the elections, the independence referendum, and ultimately the birth of a new nation.”

However, the globe-trotting eventually made it impossible for the Gresslys to stay together, and the family purchased a home in Camp Verde in 2008.

“Initially we stayed in Virginia, but then I have a son who went to Embry-Riddle [Aeronautical] University, and my wife and I had gone to [graduate school] in Glendale, and we loved Arizona, so we thought someday we got to come back to Arizona. So my son’s enrollment in Embry-Riddle was sort of the catalyst to say, ‘It’s time to go back.’ And we wanted a place where we could canoe, kayak, and that’s, of course, the Verde Valley. … So we moved to Camp Verde and I flew in and out, basically commuting with a nine to ten time zone difference.”

Those global postings after his time in Sudan included Dakar, Senegal; Mali; the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and his final position with the United Nations as the resident and humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, which he began in February 2021.

It’s a role that threw him into “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world,” Human Rights Watch’s website wrote in 2021. “Yemen is experiencing the world’s worst food security crisis with 20.1 million people — nearly two-thirds of the population — requiring food assistance at the beginning of 2020.”

That experience deepened Gressly’s work in negotiation that makes him uniquely suited to his role with the Friends of the Verde River.

“People still underestimate the value and uniqueness of this water system — the whole watershed of the Verde Valley and the Verde River down to Phoenix,” Gressly said. “I always tell people in Phoenix, 25% of your water comes from the Verde River. You need to support us so we can keep that water flowing.”

For more information about the Friends of the Verde River, visit verderiver.org.