A national initiative spearheaded by Washington University and focused on increasing undergraduate socioeconomic diversity was formally founded on Wednesday.

Last Wednesday, Saint Louis University (SLU) passed legislation forming its own chapter, SLU/FUSED. In doing so, SLU joins co-founders Washington University and Duke University. This new national organization U/FUSED (United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity) hopes to bring the issue of socioeconomic diversity to the forefront of national attention.

University seniors Fernando Cutz, Chase Sackett, and Duke senior Spencer Eldred will lead this new national organization as co-executive directors.

“We do have national structure [that] we’re trying to embed right now,” Cutz said. Sackett will be in charge of new chapter development, Cutz will be in charge of reaching out to faculty and outside organizations, as well as public relations, and Eldred will be in charge of communications.

“Part of the point of it is to gain a critical mass with this organization in order to bring more attention to the issue and, hopefully, improve socioeconomic diversity at the undergraduate level nationwide,” Sackett said.

The executive board of U/FUSED will also include the chairs of the individual chapters at each university, some graduating seniors at Washington University and at-large members.

According to Sackett, the goal now is to organize all the information that they have and put it into a format that will be useful for all the chapters that are currently in the organization, as well as possible new chapters. The website should be coming up in the next month or month and a half.

“We trying to present a united front moving forward so that we can press for this topic nationally,” Cutz said.