good education; With a combination of glamorous fund-raisers and financial savvy, three young women take up the plight of Afghan schoolchildren.

Byline: Caroline Palmer

It could be any kind of festive party, except for the ubiquitous presence of Kelly-green ribbons: threaded through a pair of Manolos, looped around the silver handle of a clutch bag, or tied elegantly around a wrist. Presiding over the crowd at Ferragamo's midtown flagship in a Marc Jacobs jacket and billowy vintage skirt is 32-year-old Elizabeth Hartnett, who explains that the ribbons are a show of support for her organization, the Rebuilding Afghanistan Foundation, and its first major success-the construction of a school in rural Wardak, Afghanistan. On hand for the virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony is A. G. Ravan Farhadi, the permanent representative of Afghanistan to the U.N., and his wife. "We have two kinds of educational needs," he says. "One, we need actual school buildings. The second is the commitment of supplies, textbooks, teachers, and a successful way to teach English along with our native languages."

R.A.F. hopes to provide both. "Very quickly after 9/11, the focus turned to Iraq," says Hartnett, an articulate brunette who grew up in Pennsylvania, earned a law degree, and now works at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York. "Afghanistan just dropped off the public radar, and I wondered what Americans were doing to help." No stranger to the benefit circuit, Hartnett approached two acquaintances, Alexandra Coolidge and Malalai Wassil, with the ...