Petula Dvorak: The best kind of handout comes from the heart

Every so often, especially this time of year, we have those moments when we think we should reach out to our fellow humans.

So we'll finally write a check to that nonprofit whose address labels we keep using. Or take cans of food or toys to the company drive.

Lynea Lindsay, 47, and five friends she has known since childhood had those thoughts last year.

They ran and they walked for multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, breast cancer, arthritis and a host of other ailments. They got the T-shirts, took the smiling photos, raised some money.

It all felt good. But it didn't feel great, three of them told me over coffee.

What they really wanted to do was help young women -- to mentor them, to step in when no one else was around.

"We're like, what do we do best? We're all intelligent young women with a lot of spirit and passion. What do we have to offer?" said Lynea, who spent years as a phone company auditor. "We're a makeup artist, federal workers, an operations manager, I do accounting. But between all of us, really we're the school of hard knocks."

And that is where their magic is.

Among them, the women have experienced teen pregnancy, drug dealing, abortion, domestic violence, suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism and all kinds of scrapes with the law.

Miraculously, they have survived and thrived. "All those years, we pulled each other up, helped each other out," Lynea said.

They are one of those rare groups of BFFs who really are best friends forever. Like those divine female friendships lionized in literature, they are the ya-ya sisterhood, the club that never broke up.

They are working to re-create that female bond for young women who have never known it. Looking around their old neighborhood east of the Anacostia River, they saw young women struggling to survive, without the benefit of divine friends to help lift them up.