She says she was motivated to found the group with fellow Kennedy School student Adam R. Taylor for a variety of reasons.

Taylor had spent last summer in Zambia and saw the ravages of the disease.

"For him, because he saw it first hand, he could communicate it so well," she says.

She also describes how her experience in Jamaica in December changed how she thought about the AIDS crisis.

"I went home in December to Jamaica thinking about what I could do," she says. "I went to work at a clinic and talked with people to see how they got access to drugs. They were dying when AIDS is a disease that one can live with in a dignified way."

The group subsequently launched the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) with seed money from the Carr Foundation.

The main focus of the group this spring has been contacting students at other universities to organize groups in letter-writing campaigns to Congress.

"We want to organize schools across the states to write 100,000 letters to Congress to appropriate $2.5 billion for AIDS in Africa prevention and treatment programs as well as community infrastructure programs," she says.

Along with Wikler's HAC, SGAC encouraged about 7,000 Harvard students to send letters before the end of the school year, Duncan says.

Members of HAC and the SGAC traveled to Washington on May 5 to learn the basics of lobbying the government. The tactics of letter writing and direct lobbying sets the student apart from the academic methods used by the Harvard faculty to pressure action on the issue.

"We don't want to do the university-student partnership," Duncan says. "We want to keep Global Justice as a distinct entity from Harvard University. Although it began at the Kennedy School, it's a separate entity."

A New AIDS Activism

Organizations such as the Harvard AIDS Institute and Partners AIDS Research Center at Mass. General Hospital that coordinate AIDS research at the University have existed for years.

Instead of working within an established academic framework, the newest student groups have different methods of pressuring the U.S. government to spend more money on the AIDS crisis.