Written by David himself: 

David Olson grew up on the Minnesota farm his Swedish family purchased in 1881, the fifth and last generation to live there. He had an idyllic childhood, and savored the opportunities the farm presented for him and his brothers – exploring the vast woods, climbing the enormous evergreen trees, ice skating and sledding, picking wild blackberries and apples, and building forts in the trees in the summer and snow banks in the winter.

Although he came to appreciate growing up on a farm, and the solid values impressed on him there, he longed to see more of the world. He grew up reading books like “Treasure Island,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Swiss Family Robinson” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and dreamed of having adventures like the characters in those books. He got his wish, traveling to 80 countries for work and pleasure, often with his beloved wife and two children, while doing work that he enjoyed and made the world a better place.

He passed away December 4, 2023 in Takoma Park, after fighting colon cancer since August 2022.

David was born on April 22, 1955 in Montevideo, Minnesota, the second of four sons, and spent his formative years on the farm. In 1971 the family left the farm and moved into a house they had built in Montevideo. In 1973, he made his first overseas trip, traveling to Russia with a group of high schoolers. A month later, he graduated from Montevideo Senior High School. 

David attended Minnesota State University, Moorhead, and graduated in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications. During his college years, he traveled twice to Europe, living and working in the Netherlands and the south of France, where he learned to speak French and became a devoted francophile. In the Netherlands, he worked in a flower bulb processing plant. In France, he helped renovate an ancient house in La Garde Freinet, a village in Provence, and picked grapes in Champagne.

After graduation, he worked for daily newspapers for five years – the Williston Daily Herald in Williston, North Dakota and the Anderson Independent-Mail in Anderson, South Carolina. In Williston, he served as reporter, copy editor, photographer, columnist, Sunday editor and acting managing editor. In Anderson, he was copy editor and Sunday editor, and met Josephine Powers (aka Jodie), his future wife, over the copy desk of the Independent-Mail.

In 1983, he embarked on two of the most significant years of his life when he joined the Peace Corps and moved to Togo, West Africa, and was assigned to the seaside village of Baguida. David taught agriculture in a secondary school and helped and encouraged his students to pursue agricultural projects (gardening and rabbit-raising) outside of school. His two years in the Peace Corps changed his life – his worldview, his social network and his career trajectory.

In 1984, Jodie visited David in Togo and the two of them traveled to Niger and Mali which proved to be a great adventure, including visits to the remote, ancient Malian cities of Timbuktu and Gao on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. On January 12, 1985, David married Jodie in Jesup, Georgia, Jodie’s hometown, and they spent the last six months of the two-year assignment in Baguida.

After finishing his volunteer service, David served as director of a Peace Corps training program in neighboring Benin for three months and then, with Jodie, traveled to Ghana, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Germany and the U.K. on their way back to the U.S.

In 1986, David and Jodie lived for a few months in New York City, where Jodie helped David land his dream job – starting a new program for Lutheran World Relief in Mali, a culturally rich and economically poor country that both of them found intriguing.

So off they went in late 1986 to Mali, where David launched a movement of sustainable development by identifying local organizations to carry out projects in gardening, wells construction, soil conservation, agroforestry, animal husbandry and appropriate technology. Jodie joined David on many of his frequent forays into the hinterlands, including to the cliffside villages of Dogon Country, the Niger River Delta, the bustling river port of Mopti, the ancient city of Timbuktu and the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert.

In 1990, Jodie gave birth to a daughter, Emmaline, in Montevideo, after which the three of them returned to Mali for the last six months of his assignment.

In 1991, when Emmaline was only eight months old, the three of them embarked on a global adventure that took them almost around the world, flying from Mali to Kenya, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, China, San Francisco and back to Atlanta.

PSI (Population Services International)

After leading an evaluation of an Oxfam U.K. project in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Uganda during the second half of 1991, David and the family settled in Jodie’s family house in Georgia while David looked for another overseas assignment.

In March 1992, David started the most significant period of his professional life when he joined Population Services International (PSI), a non-profit organization devoted to social marketing, the use of marketing techniques and private sector infrastructure to achieve social benefits, such as HIV prevention, family planning and maternal and child health.

David led PSI programs in three countries. In Zambia (1992-1996), he started an HIV prevention program that eventually added a family planning component in one of the countries most affected by the AIDS pandemic. In Bangladesh (1996-1997), he took over a mature social marketing program that was, at the time, the world’s largest social marketing program that had

made major contributions to increasing the country’s contraceptive prevalence rate. And in Paraguay (1997-2001), he launched a program of reproductive health and maternal and child health, that put a special emphasis on working with adolescents (Paraguay had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Latin America). Before moving to Paraguay, the family studied Spanish for two months in Guatemala.

While they were living in Zambia, Jodie gave birth to their second child Joshua in Jesup.

While living in these three countries, the family visited neighboring countries, including Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, India, Nepal, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru, as well as the U.K., France, Norway and Sweden.

David was most proud of his social marketing work that measurably saved and improved millions of lives by preventing HIV infection and reducing maternal and child mortality, and gave couples the chance to plan their families and have children when they wanted them.

After leaving Paraguay in December 2001, the family returned to the U.S. where David accepted a position as director of Public Affairs at PSI headquarters in Washington, D.C. and the family bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. In this role, he oversaw PSI communications and pioneered advocacy efforts to explain PSI’s HIV/AIDS prevention strategies after its work with high risk groups came under fire by conservative members of Congress. He left PSI in 2009.

David worked for the Global Health Council as director of Policy Communications from 2009-2011, doing global health advocacy with the United Nations, G8 and G20 summits and other international institutions.

Since 2011, David has worked as an independent communications and social marketing consultant for a variety of clients including the World Health Organization, World Food Program, U.S. Agency for International Development, Palladium, American Cancer Society and DKT International. He worked from home but traveled regularly to Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. His assignments ranged from reporting on marginalized groups seeking to avoid HIV infection in Kenya, launching new social marketing programs in Mali and Zambia, writing peer-reviewed journal articles and a monthly global health blog and developing a communications strategy to combat malnutrition in Burundi. He wrote more than 140 articles on global health topics.

During the time he worked for the United Nations World Food Program, the organization was the 2020 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to provide food assistance in areas of conflict, and to prevent the use of food as a weapon of war and conflict.

David was Norwegian on his mother’s side of the family, and Swedish, Alsatian and German on his father’s side. He was passionately interested in his family history, and did extensive genealogical research on the Alsatian and Swedish branches of his family. Twice, in 2002 and 2012, his genealogical exploits in Alsace were featured on Envoyé Spécial, a French television investigative news magazine show. He also tracked down some modern-day Swedish relatives and developed close ties to them.

His greatest joy was his wife and two children and, more recently, his granddaughter.

David is survived by his wife Josephine (Jodie), Takoma Park, Maryland; daughter Emmaline Mendez (Americo), Rockville, Maryland; son Joshua, Chevy Chase, Maryland; granddaughter Anna Madison, Rockville; and brothers Jeffrey, Northfield, Minnesota; Gary, Avon, Minnesota; and Neal, Camden, Maine.

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