[14][10] As president, she also assumed the sole student representative position as a voting member of the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY).

Four days after their release and announcement of further protests, the SUNY trustees voted to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa; it was the largest single act of divestiture in the United States at that time.

In 2015, she earned a doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), under the supervision of Piven and advised by James Jasper and Dan Clawson.

[17][18][19] After leaving university, McAlevey traveled through Central America, spending time in Nicaragua working to support the revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

[20] She then moved to California to work out of David Brower's Earth Island Institute on a project aimed at educating the environmental movement in the United States about the ecological consequences of US military and economic policy in Central America.

[23] From 1997 to 2001, she ran the Stamford Organizing Project, an unusual experimental approach built around a multi-union partnership – a rarity – and extensive community involvement.

[11] From the AFL-CIO, McAlevey became the national Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns of the Health Care Division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), from 2002 to 2004.

[25] McAlevey, an engaging speaker, reached global audiences when, starting in 2019, she led an intensive six-week online course, Organizing for Power (O4P), at the Berlin-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a democratic socialist policy nonprofit.

[31] She advocated for a complete restructuring of how a majority of labor unions today operate, including their approaches to leadership development, bargaining, allocation of resources, and relationship to politics.

Mobilization, which McAlevey calls "shallow organizing", seeks to motivate like-minded people to act on their belief through actions such as demonstrations or voting.

Organization, the hardest task, engages with whole populations, including those who have opposing opinions or have yet to form one, seeking to expand membership for future mobilization.

[11] On April 14, 2024, McAlevey announced on her website that she had entered home hospice care the week before, a result of a multiple myeloma cancer diagnosed in the fall of 2021.

discussing the United Auto Workers unionization win at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, McAlevey stated that she had exhausted conventional treatment and clinical trial drugs: "They thought I would be dead a few weeks ago.

[5] Writing in The Nation after McAlevey's death, journalist, academic and organizer Eleni Schirmer described "Jane’s hallmark style: big, bulging goals and a basketball-like execution plan—the precision of a thousand tiny repetitions; inviting people to touch their power, then watching them grab it for their own; the grinning, sweaty devotion to the team; the rapture of winning.