First Timucuan Parks Foundation Women’s History Month honoree

On March 8, 2020, the Timucuan Parks Foundation launched a series celebrating Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, naming MaVynee "Beach Lady" Betsch as the first woman featured in the campaign.[6] The foundation highlighted her as a champion of American Beach, underscoring her decades‑long fight to protect the historic Black beach and the towering sand formation she named NaNa Dune, the tallest dune in Florida.[2][6][15]

This recognition, coming fifteen years after her death, signaled a growing public understanding of Betsch’s role as an early Black woman leader in coastal conservation. At a time when environmental narratives have often erased the contributions of people of color, the foundation explicitly framed her work as essential to the eventual inclusion of NaNa Dune within the National Park Service’s Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in 2004.[2][6][15] By foregrounding a Black woman activist on International Women’s Day, the feature challenged conventional lists of environmental heroes and placed Betsch in the company of nationally significant conservation figures.

The campaign also contextualized her activism against the backdrop of Jim Crow segregation, explaining that American Beach had been created as a refuge for African Americans excluded from white beaches and that Betsch preserved not only dunes and habitat but also an irreplaceable piece of Black social history.[6][12][13] The Timucuan Parks Foundation’s choice to begin its series with Betsch helped introduce her story to new audiences, inspiring contemporary advocates concerned with environmental justice and historic preservation.

In the broader history of women’s activism, this 2020 spotlight marked an institutional acknowledgment of Betsch as a pioneering Black woman environmentalist whose local, place‑based organizing had national consequences for public‑lands policy and for recognition of Black coastal communities.