Mela Nichols doesn’t do things half way. Take voting rights, for instance.  She was so fervent about the need for people to vote in the 2008 election that she got more than a thousand voters registered. 
    “You owe it to the people who can’t vote to do it,”  she says.
    A sophomore student, who is thinking about majoring in screenwriting, Nichols  also volunteers with Hungry and Homeless,  in which she and other members of the project canvass the city seeking donations of  food and clothing. Just before Halloween, the group collected donations for City Harvest and Hillel.
    “Everyone who sees a homeless person in the subway has their own snap judgment,” she says. “I’m trying to transform human perception.”
     Nichols would know. When she applied to Brooklyn College, she was living in a homeless shelter. Now, she lives in a loft in Bushwick with three roommates, but her passion for helping the homeless has not dissipated.
     She’s currently working on setting up a charity comedy show on St. Patrick’s Day.  She hopes the show willraise $200,000 toward building a homeless shelter.  It will be named ”The Laughing House.”
     “I have a lot of ideas,” she says. “There won’t be a homeless person on this planet when I die. I’m so fed up with how we treat homeless people and pretend it’s not our problem. It is our problem and we are in this together.”

    When she’s not helping the homeless, Nichols is writing—she has a blog—and modeling, and she has even done some production assistant work.
    “Brooklyn College is great. It’s a beautiful campus. I love the faculty. The student body is energized,” she says. “Being here gives me great inspiration.”