Nearly 50 students packed into the Land Auditorium at the Kennedy School of Government last night for the kick-off meeting of the Harvard AIDS Coalition (HAC), a new student group formed to combat the AIDS crisis in Africa.

HAC--founded by Benjamin M. Wikler '03, John E. Raskin '03 and Andy D. Litinsky '04--plans to spearhead a national student movement to lobby the government to increase allocations for AIDS programs.

"We're starting a campaign from scratch here," Raskin said. "This could become an enormous student network."

But the students plan to start small--laying the groundwork by writing letters to members of Congress and contacting similar groups at other universities.

HAC already has an office at the Center for International Development (CID) and the group plans to attend a rally at the State House on Monday to call for more affordable AIDS drugs for Africa.

HAC's kick-off meeting last night featured impassioned student speeches and compelling statistics.

Amir Attaran, an international health researcher at CID, was the evening's primary speaker.

He began with examples to give the students a sense of the immediacy of the crisis in Africa.