Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman spoke to University of Kentucky students at the Lewis Honors College as the keynote speaker for the 2025 Lewis Honors College Leadership Conference, hosted by freshmen Singletary Scholars.
Coleman, the fifth woman in Kentucky’s history to hold the position of lieutenant governor position, is currently a UK student pursuing her doctorate in educational leadership. She spoke at the Lewis Honors College on Feb. 22 about leadership and her experience becoming a woman in the Kentucky government.
“I say this very genuinely to you, my favorite thing to do is to be with students, whether it’s high school, college, middle school,” Coleman said. “To be with you all today and get to talk with you, to hear from you, I think it’s gonna be a great experience.”
Coleman wanted to hear from the students in attendance about their hopes and concerns in Kentucky.
“The very first thing I want you to know is that if you ever plan on serving others, you ever plan on leading, you better plan on failing, because it’s part of it,” Coleman said.
Coleman said that students may think she woke up one morning and decided she wanted to be in her current position, but that was not the case.
“The line from where you are to where you wanna be is very rarely a straight path,” Coleman said. “It is usually crossing each other in circles and there’s barriers and all the things along the way.”
Coming from a background of teaching, many of Coleman’s passions lie in education. She started her career in her hometown of Burgin, Kentucky, where she got her first teaching job.
Her motivation to get into teaching was to help students understand how government works as they grew into adults.
Growing up in a household with a father who was a state representative, her great-great-grandfather was the commissioner of agriculture for Kentucky and state auditor, according to Coleman.
“You could say a little bit that it was kind of in my blood, I guess,” Coleman said. “What I noticed growing up was the conversations that we had at our dinner table were very different than the conversations my friends were having at their dinner table because none of them knew anything about the elected officials around them.”
After realizing that her friends didn’t know how the government was supposed to work or what to do when the government didn’t work for them, she decided that she was going to be a high school social studies teacher who focused primarily on teaching about the government.
Eventually, Coleman ran for state representative in her home of Mercer County, as well as Washington and part of Jessamine County fitting into the district she ran for, according to Coleman. She lost the race in 2014, according to the Courier-Journal.
Coleman did not win the race for state representative. Coleman said she had more volunteers than any other campaign in the stat and raised more money than anyone in that area had raised prior to her campaign.
“Had I not lost that race, I would not be standing where I am today,” Coleman said. “That may sound odd, and that certainly was not part of my plan, did not see that coming, but the important part here is I saw an opportunity and I took it and I made the best out of it.”
In 2019, Coleman and 12,000 of her “friends” were outside the Kentucky Capitol building protesting for their pensions, according to Coleman.
“When I was talking to teachers and people at the door about, you know, the biggest part of our budget is education. We have very few people in the house that understand what that means in real terms because they’ve never walked in the shoes before,” Coleman said.
As Coleman was leading this group, she received a phone call from the Kentucky attorney general at the time, Andy Beshear, asking if she was coming to the Capitol. This happened twice, according to Coleman.
When Coleman told her husband about this, he told Coleman that Beshear was going to run for governor of Kentucky, and he was going to ask her to be his lieutenant governor, which Coleman didn’t believe, according to her speech.
When Beshear asked Coleman to be his running mate her jaw dropped, Coleman said. Beshear told Coleman she ran the best race in the state the year she ran for state representative and even though she didn’t win, she never stopped fighting for the things that she believed in.
Beshear said he needed someone to run with that he knew had “that kind of backbone,” according to Coleman.
“I kept fighting for the kids in my classroom, in my school and all of those things,” Coleman said. “I thought, now I have the opportunity to do that for every student and every school across the state. I cannot pass up this opportunity.”
The other prior women in power in Kentucky serve as major influences to Coleman, according to her speech..
Coleman said that students have to remember the shoulders you stand on because nobody gets where they are by themselves, and they (those in power) didn’t get here without taking punches.
“You also have to reach back behind you to make sure that you’re pulling other women along with you, especially the next generation of leaders,” Coleman said. “That’s why I take this role so seriously, why it’s so important to me.”
After meeting Martha Layne Collins, Crit Luallen and other former women in power, Coleman remembers how she felt when she met them.
“Now when I see little girls who come to me, it’s like wow that is an awesome responsibility to have,” Collins said. “It’s something I think about every single day as we work towards building a better Kentucky, making sure that better Kentucky is available for everybody.”
Coleman said that one of the coolest things she gets to do every day is walking into the capitol building, saying there’s not a day she walks into the building that she doesn’t think about how lucky she is.
Beshear and Coleman are in their first year of their second term together where they have made Kentucky number two in rural job creation and where they’re trying to build an economy that serves everyone in Kentucky, according to Coleman.
“Whatever it is that you choose to do in your future, if you’re always doing it in service to other people, then it’s not always the win that matters,” Coleman said. “It’s the work that matters.”
