Her Wealth Backs Her Passion for Enriching Girls’ Lives

In a newspaper office, you get used to seeing news releases about rich people making donations to good causes--10 grand here, 5 grand there. But when marketing specialist Lynn Cornelius sent me a letter about Tricia and Al Nichols’ $200,000 challenge on behalf of Girls Inc., I confess I thought it was a typographical error.

The Nichols of Laguna Beach are offering to put up $200,000 from their own pocket to match corporate or personal contributions to Girls Inc., based in Costa Mesa. Now that’s a commitment. These aren’t your typical $1,000-a-plate donors. I told Cornelius I’d like to meet this couple, or at least whichever spouse was the driving force who believed in the cause enough to back it up with that much cash.

So I spent an extraordinary hour listening to Tricia Nichols, 46, whose passionate desire to help young women started long before she became affluent. Nichols was one of four daughters of a career Air Force officer. “I was raised in an environment where men had all the power,” she said.

After graduating from Temple University, she went into the Peace Corps in Paraguay, where civil rights for women were almost nil. Nichols started a leather goods business for women there, but after she left, it shut down; women there had so few rights that they couldn’t conduct business without her as a catalyst.

She returned to become a social worker in Massachusetts, where she says young low-income women “had very little predictability in their lives. It was a chaotic environment.”

Nichols remained in a variety of causes in which she helped women--she’s a former board president of a Planned Parenthood group--and got a master’s degree in occupational therapy. She was working at Long Beach Memorial Hospital when, through friends, she met her soon-to-be husband, Al Nichols. He’s founder of the Nichols Institute in San Juan Capistrano (now Corning-Nichols), which develops high-tech medical tests for hospitals and operates medical laboratories. They’ve been married 10 years.

The Nicholses divide their time between homes in Aspen, Colo., and Laguna Beach. Nichols continues her work helping young women, only now she can do more, because she’s so much more affluent. Her husband, she told me, supports her with enthusiasm.

It was just over two years ago that she heard about Girls Inc., a program to build self-esteem among school-age girls, aimed in part to help reduce teen pregnancies. Nichols went to one of its board meetings. She was impressed with the program but saw that the board needed a little more energy--actually, someone like her.

She helped bring on some aggressive new board members and last year helped hire a new executive director, Shelley Westmore. Westmore, who had been associate director at the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, credits Nichols as a major reason she wanted the job.

“Tricia has an incredible ability to excite and inspire people about this cause,” Westmore said. “She is passionate about helping these young women.”

Nichols’ contribution goes beyond the $200,000 challenge. When she saw that Girls Inc. didn’t have much in the way of computers, she paid to have a system installed. For the first time, said Westmore, Girls Inc. can track the progress of its former members.

The program is making headway finding companies to come up with the $200,000 match. When that’s done, you can expect Tricia Nichols to find another way to help Girls Inc.

Listening to Nichols, you know she cares about these young students. Girls Inc. conducts its sessions--a combination of tutoring, counseling, and education on their rights--on school grounds, and Nichols said there’s a waiting list of Orange County schools that have asked for the program.

I asked Nichols if there wasn’t a problem of these school girls being more influenced by their peers than by Girls Inc.

“That’s why we create a new peer group for them,” she said. “We become a place where they want to go. They haven’t been exposed to a different environment before.”

She went on to discuss why teen pregnancies are such a major problem: “These teens are actually motivated to become moms because they are failing in other parts of their lives. We help overcome those feelings.”

One thing Nichols told me I had no doubt about. “I’m a social worker at heart,” she said. “I guess I always will be.”

Reunion Time: You can hardly turn a corner at the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana without running into a graduate of Western State University College of Law in Fullerton. There’s a good chance you’ll find one sitting on the bench too. Wednesday night, the law school will honor more than 90 of its graduates who have donned the black robes in Orange County since the school was founded 30 years ago. Its annual Judges Night, at the Hacienda Restaurant in Santa Ana, will also be a chance for the legal community to meet Dennis R. Honabach, Western State’s new dean, hired to lead it through the American Bar Assn. accreditation process.

An Even Bigger Reunion: Most high school graduating classes hold reunions every five years. But if you graduated from Orange High School on North Shaffer Street in Orange, you get a party every year.

Anybody who ever graduated from Orange High is invited to the annual reunion shindig at the city’s Hart Park near the Garden Grove Freeway. One school employee who usually goes describes it as a “fun boutique-reunion” because there’s always a few booths with somebody selling something.

They Are United: United Way of Orange County kicked off its annual fund-raising campaign over the weekend, its goal to improve on the $18 million it raised this past year. A pie chart it produced shows that 7.7% of its money was spent on fund-raising, 11.9% on operating costs, and 80.4% went for services. It shows you’ve been around Orange County for awhile if you remember when the United Way was known as the Community Chest, the United Fund or the Red Feather Campaign.

Wrap-Up: Tricia Nichols has never forgotten the women of Paraguay. She’s kept in contact with several families over the years, and she and her husband have taken into their home two young women from there. One they put through college and the second is in college here now.

Nichols says improvement for women in Paraguay has been “negligible” over the 25 years since she was in the Peace Corps there: “These women have no interest in going back to that kind of life.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com