Photo Credit: UNT faculty profile

Hope Supply Company (HSC) enjoys the support of many service organizations and businesses. Over 100 such groups provide volunteers each year to prepare materials for distribution; others financially undergird our efforts. Amid the various ways the community comes alongside HSC, one individual demonstrates a unique approach to being an advocate for diaper need.

Hoda Emam, instructor at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, challenged her students in a visual journalism class to consider options for their final project. As an example, she reviewed with them her own published work on diaper need. “I was really taken aback by how many of my students told me they wanted to cover diaper need because either they didn't know it was an issue or they also had family members who had young children in diapers,” explains Emam.

“I think a major ‘aha’ for them was just learning that there are individuals who need diapers. As simple as that is, I think it just wasn't on their radar. It wasn't something that they thought about,” Emam says. “It's really hard to talk about early childhood needs when you're 19 or 20 years old and in college; your thoughts and processes are in different places.

“There's a lot of topics that we have students cover that may not be on their radar because as a journalist, you don't always get to choose the story that you cover. It is kind of intentional for students to get out of their comfort zone,” she explains.

As Emam brought up the topic of diaper need and demonstrated through her own work that a reputable news organization covered the issue, she opened many eyes. As she shared the audio clips of many of the individuals that she interviewed, she said she felt that students “were more impacted when they could hear not only the individual's emotions but also very true and candid experiences.”

One of the students who took on the topic chose Hope Supply Co. as the focus of his project. He filmed and interviewed staff, volunteers and clients to gain understanding of the challenges at-risk and homeless families face in providing diapers for their children. In the end he produced a short promotional video about diaper need and HSC’s efforts to address it.

Helping students understand issues like this energizes Emam. “I plan to incorporate as much about diaper need as I can within the curriculum that I teach as a journalist. I think we don't have enough news on equitable access to basic needs. Having more students research it in their early careers just opens their perspective of the kind of struggles that so many families face, but essentially silently.”

Emam’s own discovery of diaper need started during the pandemic when the local news outlet she reported for assigned her to a story about a food drive in her neighborhood. “I spoke with a mother who had gone to the food pantry, and I wanted to get her experience not just on accessing food, but also accessing food during the pandemic and the processes that were in place. And she told me that she was going to the food pantry to get food, but the real reason was that this particular food pantry was also providing diapers. At the time, she had two children in diapers, and the money that she was able to save by getting the diapers through the food pantry actually helped her pay her utility bills on time. This was a very eye-opening experience for me,” Emam reflected.

At the time she worked on that story, she had children in diapers. “I remember how I felt very privileged to have never thought about the cost of diapers. And then during the pandemic there was a diaper shortage, and whether you could afford it or not, everybody was limited to a certain supply of diapers,” she recalled. “I felt like that not only evened out the playing field as everybody understood what it is to not have access to something that a child needs, it also put so much into perspective as to what a parent has to deal with when they are already under an immense amount of stress, whether it's work-related or finances, and then have to face the question, ‘Is my child going to be able to have a clean diaper?’ It was so eye-opening to also be a mother of children in diapers at the same time that I was researching and learning so much about this.”

It was these initial insights that led Emam to focus on diaper need for many of her projects and now, also, to open the eyes of journalism students for years to come. 

Some of Hoda Emam’s published works on diaper need:

Diaper bank aids those hit hardest by the pandemic (Local News Matters Bay Area)

Diapers are unaffordable for many families. Now states are looking to Medicaid for help. (NBC News)

Diapers or dinner? An impossible choice (Harvard Public Health)