- October 28, 2026
- By Maryland Today Staff
Helping more than 50,000 people facing hunger get food on the table every year goes way beyond collecting food. It’s about collecting data.
Three staffers at Manna Food Center in Montgomery County spend their days reaching out to residents to explain eligibility for SNAP benefits, gather documentation, complete applications and guide them through enrollment. Between the metrics required by funders and the data Manna collects to answer its own questions, the team is overwhelmed.
“The data collection and analysis take up time that we should be spending talking to community members and submitting applications,” said Jenna Umbriac, vice president of programs.
On Wednesday, University of Maryland students will serve up their ideas to both streamline this work and to improve Manna’s outreach amid federal cuts to SNAP, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
That’s the challenge of this semester’s Interfraternity Case Competition in the Robert H. Smith School of Business, which puts new members of its four fraternities (which despite the name welcome all genders) to work on real community issues. Past competitions have partnered with organizations such as EveryMind, a Montgomery County mental health nonprofit; the Institute of Creative Community Initiatives, a Prince George’s County nonprofit serving youth, adults and families in vulnerable communities; Junior Achievement; and the State Employees Credit Union (SECU).
In the competition, 21 teams — composed of pledges from Alpha Kappa Psi, Delta Sigma Pi, Phi Chi Theta and Pi Sigma Epsilon — all work on the same case from their own angle. Teams first face off against others from within their own fraternity, and the top team from each fraternity advances to the “Shark Tank”-style finals. Representatives of Manna (including Umbriac and board of directors Chair Margaret Rogers ’97, ’00) and sponsoring accounting firm KPMG International decide the winner of the $1,000 top prize.
“The biggest thing they get out of this is the mindset that business doesn’t have to just be about how we make a profit or how we have a positive impact, but it’s how we do both at the same time,” said Nima Farshchi, director of the Smith School’s Center for Social Value Creation, which organizes the competition in cooperation with KPMG and the school’s four national business fraternities.
Farshchi, faculty adviser for Alpha Kappa Psi, said he looks forward to the atmosphere of the competition each year.
“The cheering and the happiness in the room is kind of like a high school pep rally,” he said. “It’s a supportive, positive environment that really goes counter to some of the stereotypes about Greek life.”
During the lead-up and the competition itself, the pledges get early hands-on consulting experience: working in teams under a deadline, analyzing a business problem and presenting their recommendations to industry professionals.
In this case, the need to streamline operations at a food pantry transcends Manna. Rising inflation, tariffs and the war in Iran have driven up the cost of groceries and gas, even as more than 5 million Americans lost SNAP eligibility following passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill last July.
“SNAP is the best tool we have to pull people out of food insecurity in this country,” but many lawfully present immigrants “are afraid to touch it, or even hear about it,” Umbriac said.
In the DMV, 38% of families experienced food insecurity in the past year, the 2026 Hunger Report from the Capital Area Food Bank found; the figure is 56% in Prince George’s County, and 31% in Montgomery.
A group of pledges from Delta Sigma Pi is focused on helping Manna respond to this growing crisis in a way “that’s operationally realistic and compassionate,” said Cindy Nguyen ’29, a business analytics and information science double-major. Bioengineering major Elise Jorgensen ’29, who is on a team from Phi Sigma Epsilon, called the competition a “great, organized way to give back.”
Lauren Frank ’27 contributed to this article.