Anyone who doubts that doing good leads to doing well — and then to doing more good — has obviously never met Lucy Rosen. The marketing and public relations authority was a young relocated Albuquerquian who transformed a visceral reaction into her professional NYC springboard. “I’d never seen a homeless person before I came to Manhattan in 1985,” declares Rosen, “and I was appalled.

“So I called the Partnership for the Homeless and told them, ‘I’m going to help you get rid of homelessness,’” recalls Rosen, who knows the organization’s leadership thought she was overconfident, at the least. “I tend to really jump into what I get interested in,” she says. But Rosen had a plan: Charging nothing, she photographed homeless individuals, created posters, wrote evocative text, persuaded printers to donate services, and utilized free public-service-announcement space on subway cars. From the poster campaign, “the Partnership got more donations in 18 months than they had in its entire history,” Rosen reports.

The high-profile pro bono work, in turn, helped her acquire paying clients, and soon Rosen’s firm, the Business Development Group, now based in Garden City, was thriving. For more than 20 years her successes have multiplied, with such clients as Allstate, Smith Barney and Apple & Eve. Now mother to Samantha, 12, Rosen (who credits her ex-mother-in-law, business author and speaker Marcia Rosen, as her most significant mentor) is also committed to “empowering” women. She founded and runs Women on the Fast Track, a networking organization for businesswomen worldwide.

And serving community needs remains important to Rosen. She created BDG’s Gratitude Award a decade ago to give recognition — and about $100,000 worth of public-relations assistance — to a different not-for-profit group each year. The current recipient is Islandia-based Pal-O-Mine, a therapeutic horseback-riding organization. “I want to give away as much as I can to as many people as I can,” Rosen states simply.