Dr. Betsee Parker

Booster — Class of 1969

Dr. Betsee Parker, Baroness of Locheil in Scotland, has currently been nominated to become a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, having received many awards for her philanthropic work in Sustainable Development and Climate Change throughout Africa and at the Vatican. She has met with numerous African Presidents and Vice-Presidents, helped to build sustainable development centers throughout the African continent, and undergirded the Ebola crisis in Guinea, meeting with President Alpha Conde there during the height of the epidemic. She was the only American to do so. She is an appointed Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and the African Union, and a senior member of Macroeconomist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs’s American and African Think Tanks on Sustainable Development.

In 2001 at the World Trade Center Disaster, she was a First Responder Leader for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and received two Honorary Doctorates and Distinguished Service Awards for her service in 9/11. She was recipient of an Alumni Achievement Award at Harvard in 2016, and graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1985, and Wellesley College in 1982.

Since the age of 8, she has been training in, showing, coaching, and sponsoring equestrians at the highest national level of the sport, becoming the winningest owner in American history of Hunter horses and ponies. All along, she has sponsored and developed talented youth to the national level, winning numerous prestigious finals several times including the International Hunter Derby Finals, the National PreGreen Hunter Incentive Finals, Pony Finals, Devon, Pennsylvania National Horse Show Finals and Grand Championships at The National and Washington International Horse Shows.

Since there weren’t many opportunities for young women to be all they could be athletically at Southwest High School in 1969, she has decided to gift the Southwest High School to boost the level of young women’s athletic programs in hopes of assisting Southwest High School to become a leader in young women’s athletic programs. Dr. Parker believes strongly in young woman athletes, and the power strong athletic programs have to build leaders in society.