A long-time volunteer and Founding Mother of the Contra Costa National Women's Political Caucus, present at every key inflection point of the chapter's first quarter-century.
Judy Coleman is recognized as a 1999 inductee of the Contra Costa Herstory Project. In the Project's founding narrative, Sunne Wright McPeak names Judy among the close colleagues and long-time volunteers who gathered at Louise Aiello's Martinez home in 1999 to mark the 20th anniversary of McPeak's swearing-in as County Supervisor — and whose collective recollection that day became the Herstory Project itself.
Judy is identified as one of the Founding Mothers or early leaders of the Contra Costa NWPC, the chapter founded in 1973 at Paula Schiff's Walnut Creek home with a deliberate, focused mission: increase the number of women in appointed and elected office in Contra Costa County. The Caucus's organizing model in the 1970s — combining household-hosted strategy luncheons with countywide candidate recruitment, training, and fundraising — depended on women like Judy who showed up cycle after cycle, opened their networks to first-time candidates, and translated big civic ambitions into the meeting-by-meeting organizing that actually wins seats.
That McPeak names Judy in the same breath as Ginny March, Jane Emanuel, Taalia Hasan, Mary Rocha, and Lucia Albers places her in the inner circle of NWPC's first-generation leadership — the women whose names do not appear on the ballot but without whom the women whose names did appear would not have prevailed. Her induction in 1999 was not an honorary courtesy: it was an acknowledgment that a quarter-century of sustained, behind-the-scenes work had reshaped the political landscape of the County.
As with several of the 1999 inductees, the formal record of Judy's individual contributions remains thin in the public press of the period — a familiar pattern for women whose civic work happened in living rooms, church basements, and committee meetings rather than on press-release datelines. The Herstory Project exists in part to repair this kind of archival gap.
Judy is among the early leaders of the Contra Costa National Women's Political Caucus, founded in 1973 at Paula Schiff's Walnut Creek home with the focused mission of increasing the number of women in appointed and elected office.
Across more than two decades of NWPC organizing, Judy is one of the close colleagues and long-time volunteers whose sustained, cycle-after-cycle work translates the Caucus's countywide vision into actual meetings, candidate recruitment, and fundraising.
Attends the surprise gathering at Louise Aiello's Martinez home celebrating the 20th anniversary of Sunne McPeak's swearing-in as County Supervisor — the conversation that became the genesis of the Contra Costa Herstory Project.