UW-Eau Claire is at the forefront of a national initiative aimed at increasing college-aged participation in local communities.

The initiative, called the American Democracy Project, involves 140 universities and public colleges across the nation, according to its Web site.

Through in-class newspaper readings and university-sponsored events with the community, the ADP stresses both community and political involvement.

“There’s a feeling that people on campus aren’t involved in civic life as they should be,” said assistant history professor Jason Tetzloff, who became one of the first faculty members to implement the ADP curriculum into his classroom.

“We want the students involved because they can make a difference in their own and other people’s lives,” Tetzloff said. “Otherwise they won’t have a voice. Just look at your tuition (increase).”

Two summers ago, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities , The New York Times and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching decided to take action on the voting issue and organized a meeting with more than a dozen university provosts, said Provost Ron Satz, who was one of the provosts present.

“The (voting) issues that face us are grave,” said Satz, who is a member of the ADP’s steering committee. “We are trying to raise the students’ consciousness level to the things that are going on around them locally.”

Satz and other faculty undertook the task of running the nation’s first ADP pilot program at Eau Claire. In the pilot, five faculty members involved The New York Times in their curriculum with more than 140 first-year students, in the hopes that the paper would raise civic awareness and community participation.

Satz, Tetzloff and Don Mowry, director of the Center for Service-Learning, presented the pilot to the AASCU and The New York Times last summer to showcase the results.

Since the pilots of Eau Claire and two other colleges, the project has expanded and is now being implementeed nationwide.

At Eau Claire this fall, the program has expanded to 35 faculty members and more than 1,000 freshmen.

Although the program is slotted to run for three years, Satz and other faculty hope to carry the ADP onto future generations of students until it becomes standard practice.

“I have been involved from the start and will continue to be involved in the project for the next three years and beyond,” Satz said.

As a step toward this goal, Eau Claire recently sent two students to a training retreat that will help them teach other students how to become politically active and community-oriented.

“There’s a lot for students to gain to be involved in their community,” said junior Eric Ristau, one of the Eau Claire students who participated in the retreat. “And there’s not a lot to lose besides time.”

The ADP’s future prospects include having students picked from participating universities to student-edit at The New York Times, and the implementation of the ADP curriculum into the K-12 ages.