"A university with a $19.2 billion endowment should say we are also part of global civil society," Sachs said at the time.

Sachs has a history of speaking out on the cause of fighting AIDS in poor countries.

On Nov. 30, he took part in a panel discussion at the ARCO Forum on the impact of AIDS in Africa and the complexity of trying to fight it.

Sachs stressed the need for cheaper drugs as part of a coherent plan by which Western nations can address the AIDS crisis.

Contacted by e-mail in Beijing last week, Sachs says the Consensus Statement has had an "enormous" effect on policymakers across the world, in particular in the U.S. government and the U.N.

"It had a big effect in pushing forward the argument that it is time to scale up dramatically the use of antiretroviral therapies in poor countries," he says.

On Feb. 6, Sachs kicked off a speakers' series on "AIDS in Africa" that was co-sponsored by his Center for International Development and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, affiliated with the Kennedy School.

In the audience that night was one of his students from the Kennedy School, G. Imani Duncan. She says the positive response to the speech, along with other conversations and experiences with AIDS she has had in her native Jamaica led her to decide the time was right to take action on the issue.

"A group of us at the Kennedy School thought this could be something very powerful," she says.

Building An NGO

A soon-to-be graduate of the Masters of Public Administration at the Kennedy School, Duncan co-founded "Global Justice" as a non-governmental organization (NGO) to "mobilize students in the U.S. with students internationally to promote global justice and responsibility through education, advocacy and better public policies."

The first big choice for Global Choice, however, was what cause they should take up first.

They considered food security, education, the environment and AIDS. In the end, she decided with Taylor and Sachs that the best issue to take on is AIDS.

"We chose the AIDS campaign because we thought it was coming to the fore," she says. "It best encompassed the various inequalities of poverty--if you are poor, you will die."