Summary: Entergy Corporation, an electric company operating in some of the poorest states in the United States, commissioned Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor in 2006 to examine the potential impact that investing in the eradication of poverty could have on all U.S. households. The result was a 20-page report titled The Economics of Poverty: How Investments to Eliminate Poverty Benefit All Americans. While the full report addresses how an investment in the elimination of poverty could affect health, education, employment, homelessness, hunger and crime, this analysis focuses primarily on the energy-related findings contained in the full report and in a report the authors prepared for Entergy in 2001.

Summary: Central Missouri Community Action is completing its fourth year in contracting with the Missouri Department of Social Services Family Support Division to implement the Energy Assistance (EA) component of LIHEAP. Prior to this, Missouri's EA was implemented through local county welfare offices. Although bureaucratic procedures are necessary and important to ensure proper implementation of public policy, CMCA had come to realize that unnecessary bureaucracy had become a barrier to effectively serving the spirit of public policy at our agency. In this case study, authors Randy Cole and Chris Macy describe how CMCA made its EA program paperless through digital imaging and restructured the entire process to increase efficiency and overcome traditional bureaucratic barriers.