Rural regions face a unique set of educational challenges. Issues such as low funding and limited opportunities to participate in afterschool activities create unnecessary hurldles that disproportionately affect rural students. Competitive debaters have been shown to exhibit significantly higher levels of college readiness, academic performance, standardized test scores, and four-year university attendance and graduation rates than non-debaters. RuDI seeks to improve rural participation in competitive debate to help bridge the achievement gap between rural and non-rural students.

In-person competitive debate and other competitive afterschool activities have traditionally been very difficult to implement in rural regions. Long distances between schools make travel both time-consuming and costly, and smaller average student populations make finding interested students and qualified instructors in the same school more difficult.

RuDI will be organized primarily in a virtual format which will allow for the creation of a diverse community composed of rural students from across the country that will not require extensive tournament travel and allow for both partnerships between students from differing schools and coaching between coaches and students located in different parts of the country.

A virtual debate ecosystem is now a real possibility in a post-COVID world. In 2020 and 2021, substantial investments in technology and broadband access made online learning a real possibility, particularly in rural regions. Many competitive debates successfully transferred online during this period, further demonstrating the potential to bring debate to rural students.