A New York community organiser, Michele was active in New York’s lesbian visibility movement in the 1990s. She did community organizing around the Christian-right led anti-Gay and Lesbian referendums in the United States in 1994. After the World Trade Center bombings, she worked with New York City and Connecticut anti-war movements against the US-led conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kelley has studied the World Bank and development policy and was a member of the Secretariat of the Independent People’s Tribunal against the World Bank in India. She contributed to the Out against the Right: An Organizing Handbook, which documents local struggle tactics against the Christian Right. Most recently she co-edited "The World Bank and Neo-Liberalism in India" (New Delhi : Orient Blackwan, Forthcoming 2009).