Michele is the Executive Director/Lawyer with the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre, a non-profit legal clinic serving small urban and rural communities in eastern Ontario, Canada. In addition to traditional lawyering, she has led legal literacy, community development, systemic advocacy, and law reform projects. Current community-based action research projects include working with “trusted intermediaries” in Justice & Health Partnerships and a small research study into the civil legal needs of people who are or have been incarcerated in a correctional/detention centre.
She has been a member of the International Legal Aid Group since 2009. She has advised the Open Society Foundation’s Justice Initiative, International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine), and Namati on legal empowerment, paralegals, Ontario’s community legal clinic system, and SDG 16.3 measurement indicators.
She was a founding member of the Association of Community Legal Clinics Ontario (ACLCO). Her work within Ontario’s clinic system has included developing performance evaluation, quality assurance, and outcome measurement systems; a clinic managers’ community of practice, a legal aid service coordination network; an action research project to improve knowledge management, and; promoting holistic services and rural justice initiatives.
She is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University (Ontario) with published articles on reflective practice, action research, legal education reform, and access to justice. She was a Law Foundation of Ontario Community Leadership in Justice Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School (2009) and a Visiting Fellow at Australian National University (2014, 2017) and Bond University (2017).
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