In the 1990s, Shelley starred in various big and small screen movies as well as guest-starred in various TV series. But more notably, Shelley started focusing on other ventures. In 1994, she set her sights on a county Democratic Central Committee seat in the Westside and San Fernando Valley district; but she was disqualified. (She came down with the flu; so she asked someone else to take over the signature-gathering needed to secure her a seat. But the man who did it didn’t live in the 41st District (a requirement) so it rendered all the signatures he gathered invalid.) Also, she began to take an active role in political fund-raising. She began performing extensive work in national, state and municipal election organization and registration - focusing on bringing women into the political process. She gained vast experience working with American political candidates and in the political process of the United States in her home state by then, California. She received her MBA from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) and, in 1997, she formed Shelley Hack Media Consultancy (SHMC) a media consultancy firm that worked in pre- and post-conflict countries. It was a company that internationally specialized on projects that focused on the intersection between media and the development of civil society. She would go into war-torn countries and help them establish democracy through media, which was often done with the help of televised political debates. "I have a consultancy company, and I basically do institution building in post-conflict countries" she told one reporter later. And in 1997, she started in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
