They exist in a world of $ 5,000 gowns and chauffeur-driven limousines. They live for the night, when they burst into bloom at yet another party for yet another cause. They are an eclectic mix of the old rich and the nouveau, of dilettantes and debutantes, of the successful and the wanna-be's, all working the benefit circuit. They pay upward of $ 1,000 a ticket to socialize with the same people as the night before, to smile for the paparazzi and jockey for attention. And they do it all in the name of charity.

There is, thankfully, another side. Across the country, volunteerism is on the rise. A national Gallup poll in 1984 found that 31 percent of those surveyed did some charity work. By last year, that figure had soared to 50 percent. More than 600 corporations now have community service programs for their workers, and Xerox, IBM and Wells Fargo bank have designed "social service leaves" for those who want to take a sabbatical from careerism and do some good.

For all of the help provided by corporations, however, it is strong-minded individuals working on their own who have opened up new avenues away from the old charity whirl. This story is about three such individuals -- three professional women who figured out a different way to do it.

For Suzette Brooks, a 29-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who labors as a corporate lawyer on Park Avenue, it meant starting New York Cares, a volunteer organization whose scheduling is arranged around the hectic work styles of hundreds of young professionals. For Susan Gatten, 40, until recently the president of the San Francisco Junior League, it meant reforming her group from within so that the bulk of its financial and personal resources would go from socializing to community AIDS work. And for Missy Staples Thompson, 33, heiress to the old-money Peavey grain fortune, it meant starting up her own company to help lower-class families finance their own homes.
Starting From Scratch

It's 11 a.m. on Sunday and 15 young professionals, about equally divided between men and women, are hunched over a long prep table in the basement kitchen of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The group is dicing and slicing with the agility and concentration of a good relay team.

Some are performing final preparations on 450 servings of tuna casserole. Others are dealing with 450 slices of pineapple upside-down cake. Over in the corner are 450 neatly bagged, high-protein take-home lunches assembled earlier in the morning. In the church rec room next to the kitchen, more volunteers are preparing 150 place settings on school lunch tables. They'll redo this chore twice more in the next several hours.

Outside, in the largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood just south of Columbia University, the line of homeless and hungry starts filing into the rec room. Mostly down-and-out looking men, they are not especially grateful or polite to their hosts. But the hosts, to a one, say they're not here to be thanked.

They also insist they're not working in New York Care's soup kitchen because volunteering has become fashionable, like Corona beer or Jeeps. Says founder Suzette Brooks: "There are a lot of young professionals out there who feel they are focusing much too much on themselves, their career advancement and on their clients. They want to give something."

Besides the soup kitchen, New York Cares volunteers, now 600 strong, are working in several homeless shelters and welfare hotels. They also work with Dorot, a local group that serves the elderly, and 38 other volunteer or social service agencies. Member participation in programs ranges from once every six months to twice a week. The spectrum of work runs from an occasional stint on the soup line to weekly trips to Brooklyn to help hammer homes out of abandoned buildings for ghetto residents.

Brooks started the group two years ago with a handful of college classmates. She had always thought of herself as socially conscious. But she got out of Harvard Law School with the feeling that it might be time to put something back into the world that was her oyster.

What could she do? She started her corporate law job and began plotting with some like-minded friends. All were newly minted Manhattan professionals; all had turned their backs on the slick benefits that seemed to rule the charity world. They also had trouble fitting into the structured world of the usual volunteer work. "Most volunteer placements have been during the day, and our people needed to volunteer at night or on the weekends," says Brooks.

"They also needed flexibility -- a lot of groups have members volunteer three times a week. For most of our members it couldn't be more than once a week, simply because of their heavy job commitments."

The nascent group, meeting after hours in members' living rooms, coalesced. Networking parties were thrown, social agencies called, volunteers rounded up. New York Cares' membership of young professionals began expanding exponentially. Young bankers, lawyers and junior executives finally had a clearinghouse for volunteering. "We found that agencies wanted us," Brooks says, "because our volunteers were different from any they had seen before. Most of the traditional volunteers they see are teen-agers, housewives or retired people. We can't give the time those groups give, but the quality of our time is, well, excellent."

There is no hard sell to members for cash. "This group is much more about giving time and books and clothes than money," says Brooks. This year, New York Cares' budget will be $ 100,000, out of which will come salaries for two permanent staff members who will man the group's phone, arrange schedules and do outreach work.

In the beginning, some friends counseled Brooks that she would be taking a big risk to get so involved, especially so early in her career. After all, she was violating the first commandment of the young urban professional: If you want to hit the top, you must appear dedicated exclusively to your job and company.

But Brooks refused to hide her second agenda. In fact, she wrote a long memo to her firm's board of directors asking for support. The partners of Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn agreed. They allowed Brooks to write and print the New York Cares newsletter with company equipment. At night she could use the firm's conference room for group meetings. "After they thought about it," says Brooks, "the firm realized it would be good for them."

But what about other places where the bosses might not be so understanding? "I think a lot of young people," Brooks says, "realize it might be okay to do a little something more with their lives, even if it means making vice president in two years instead of six months."

The Junior Leaguer

The first floor of the attractive building, located in a heavily boutiqued neighborhood, is taken up by the San Francisco Junior League's thrift store. The place looks like most Junior League stores, its windows filled with golf clubs, thermos sets and high-quality clothes handed down by members. The second floor holds the well-appointed headquarters of the League itself. Centered on the wall behind the reception desk is a poster-sized, framed picture of a proper-looking League member unabashedly hugging a desiccated man dying of AIDS.

Mounted in such a genteel setting, the photo is doubly disturbing. And that, says Susan Gatten, is exactly the point. Sitting in the League president's office, Gatten is explaining how the local chapter radically redirected most of its organizational attention to the AIDS crisis.

The San Francisco Junior League was founded in 1911. Today it ranks as the fifth oldest and 10th biggest chapter in the world. So when Gatten moved to town in 1970 with some sorority mates from Indiana University, the League seemed like a logical place to stop. Her mother had done volunteer work back in South Bend, and Gatten had just joined the Junior League before leaving Indiana. "I didn't join the San Francisco chapter out of some tremendous need to do something for the community," she says. "I just thought the League would give me a bunch of people to know in a new city."

"The League was more social then," Gatten admits, with some understatement. "But things were beginning to change. Many of the younger members were split. On the one hand, they wanted to be community activists, like they were in school. But they also wanted to retain the hometown feeling they got from belonging to the Junior League." The local chapter also became divided into two groups -- "the day members, who didn't work, and the night members, who did."

The night members were made up mostly of younger women who had come out of college in the late '60s -- working women like Gatten herself. She had a master's degree in organizational communication, and she went to work as a corporate trainer for the Charles Schwab brokerage firm. By day, her job was to teach managers how to manage, run meetings and maximize their time. By night, she began to do volunteer work. Her first project was working with the local Special Olympics. After that she did community projects in Chinatown and worked on a program to keep disadvantaged minority kids in school.

And then came the AIDS epidemic. Gatten, insulated personally from the effects of the carnage, watched in growing horror. "I'd see the television news," she says, "and they'd always announce the new AIDS death figures of the week."

AIDS hit close to home when a good friend of hers at Charles Schwab died of the disease in 1982. "I just had to do something," she says. She decided to try to get the Junior League to help. "I'm not the Eleanor Roosevelt or Florence Nightingale type," she says, "but I couldn't just stand by and watch. I decided to do what I do best -- organize and educate."

The first thing she did was get the League to give a $ 35,000 grant to the Shanti Project, a local organization that provided home and health-care support to those with AIDS. It was the first substantial donation Shanti had gotten from a nongay group. But Gatten wanted the League to give more than money. In 1986, she nominated herself for chapter president and won.

And her intentions were obvious. She sent a letter to the members that began, "Our city has never faced a more formidable foe. More San Franciscans have already died of AIDS than were killed in the Great Earthquake of 1906."

Gatten was pleasantly surprised by how little static she got, so she set to work. With Shanti, she developed a speaker's bureau made up of Junior League members who would travel the city educating the straight world about the disease. "We were helpful in reaching the corporate community," Gatten says, "because when one of our members spoke, [she was] perceived as a quote-unquote normal person. It was less threatening."

Members also began training in how to counsel and care for people with AIDS. Working in the the gay community proved educational for both groups. "They had as many misconceptions about us as we had about gay people," Gatten says. "A lot of them had a picture of Miss Bouncy Junior Leaguer. But perceptions on both sides were scraped away when everybody realized we had to collaborate." In time, more than 100 League members, about 10 percent of the chapter, became actively involved.

Money has also been forthcoming. Over the next three years, $ 150,000 -- a third of the chapter's budget -- will go to AIDS. The money that comes in from those spiffy handed-down golf clubs and Thermoses in the thrift shop also goes to fight the disease. (Much of the rest of the group's money is spent on projects for the homeless, and on Huckleberry House, a shelter for runaway youth.)

Gatten also began speaking to other Junior Leagues throughout the country. In April 1987, she stood up at the League's International Conference in Nashville and offered a resolution calling for the group's 170,000 members to get involved actively in AIDS work. Gatten's month of pre-convention politicking worked: The resolution passed.

While her term as president just ended, Gatten continues to spread the word. No, she says, she doesn't have children, and yes, her husband understands her compulsion to help. Sometimes, she admits, the work takes a little bit of edge off her career.

"Once in a while someone will come to me with a work problem, and I'll think, 'Leave me alone! People are dying out there!' " She doesn't sound at all like the stereotypical Junior Leaguer. "This disease," she says, "scares the hell out of me."

The Heiress
At 8:30 in the morning, Missy Staples Thompson is already working the phone in her tiny office in St. Paul. Beside her desk is a neighborhood map of the Twin Cities dotted with little pins. Before her are papers detailing a current project that will allow low-income households in the Hispanic section of St. Paul to renovate boarded-up town houses, then buy them for a pittance. "It's a rush," she says, "to bring people who thought they never had a chance into the fantasy world of actually owning their own place."

Tonight Thompson has a board meeting for the Illusion Theater. The Illusion is known for its "prevention" program -- a traveling series of plays, performed at schools, about sexual abuse and family problems. Up for discussion tonight will be new plays for children about drug abuse and AIDS. "It's great," says Thompson, "to see that the performing arts can help solve social problems. It's a concept that actually works."

Thompson's first volunteer experience had come at 15, when she worked as a candy-striper at a Minneapolis hospital. After high school, however, she headed off for the University of San Francisco and the remnants of the counter-culture. During her junior year in college she bummed around Southeast Asia for a year. "When I came back to the States, I knew it was time to get real," she says. Her first stab at getting real came when she snared a full-time job in the St. Paul mayor's office. Her duty was to find housing for people living in condemned buildings and for battered mothers living on the street. "Poverty became very real to me. And a lot of times I was just helpless and frustrated. Do you know what it's like to not be able to make housing materialize for a mother with three children? For a long time I internalized everything," she says. After a couple of years, Thompson decided it was time to go. "I got beaten down and desensitized," she says.

She took a job as project coordinator for a developer who built subsidized housing in small Minnesota towns. Using the skills she had learned working for the city, she felt useful. By day she worked in commercial real estate. By night she volunteered for the women's auxiliary of the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra and did Junior League work.

But though she was busy, something was missing. So she quit. Everything. Then, a year ago, she started her own company, Thompson Associates. Her firm provides marketing and sales experience to small-scale real estate developers who want to do low-income housing.
Her priority at the moment is a development in St. Paul. Two years ago, some town houses were closed down in the Hispanic part of town. The McKnight Foundation bought the condemned properties and set about fixing them up. Thompson is helping develop the project, which allows families to buy two-bedroom houses for $ 30,000. "It's so incredible," she says, "to be able to see single moms, who make $ 13,000 a year at the phone company, buying their own homes."

Thompson also couldn't resist getting back into volunteering. She saw a play put on by the Illusion Theater and immediately joined the troupe's board. She also enlisted to be on the board of the Ripley Foundation, a small, grant-giving organization that funds projects for battered and homeless women and children.

"Sometimes it drives me crazy," she says. "I keep wanting to get more people involved. I wonder, who are all these fancy people building all these fancy homes and driving fancy cars? Why don't I know them, why don't they help, and why can't I bring them into volunteering?"

Neal Karlen is a contributing editor of Rolling Stone. This article first appeared in Savvy Woman.