It Girls.

Byline: BY JEAN HANFF KORELITZ EDITOR: ALEXANDRA KOTUR

CHARITY MAY BEGIN AT HOME, BUT FOR THREE NEW YORKERS, IT BLOOMED IN A HARLEM NEIGHBORHOOD.

My DNA is a little weird," says Shafi Roepers, laughing, about her peculiar brand of hyperkinesis. "My parents always said, 'Calm down! Calm down!' "

It's true that no one would accuse Roepers of being calm. The mother of three and wife of a hedge-fund manager, she was struck by the chasm between her own extremely privileged children and the destitute New York City children they live among. She had done a fair amount of charity work but had grown weary of, as she termed it, "writing the big check" and not remaining involved, a style of giving that seemed old-fashioned. Roepers felt herself drawn to a more hands-on, grassroots approach. "We're one community here," she insists. "We should stay one community."

So in 2007, Roepers contacted Gretchen Buchenholz, executive director of the Association to Benefit Children (ABC) and something of a legend in alleviating childhood suffering in New York, and toured her Echo Park facility, which houses a day-care and Head Start program in Harlem. "Shafi seemed to be very moved by our children, but I had no idea what a real advocate she was," Buchenholz says now. "I didn't expect her ever to call back."

Roepers did far more than just call back. She asked one simple but catalytic question: What do you need?

What Buchenholz needed was two things, actually. She needed an indoor gym to keep the children active when Echo Park's roof playground was inaccessible. And she needed a place for the teenagers who were hanging out on the street corner a block away, the same corner where prisons routinely dropped off newly released inmates. Buchenholz showed Roepers a room in the basement, packed with 20 years' worth of files and dominated by a concrete ramp (a relic from the building's distant past as a coffin factory). Roepers started making calls on the ride downtown.