Last month, Nathalie McDermott, Director of On Road Media, a social media training social enterprise, left an insightful comment on my post about the danger of promoting the mythology of the social entrepreneur.

Over the past 5 years, at gatherings and conferences etc., I have witnessed a new breed of professional “Social Entrepreneur” who is usually well-educated, well-spoken and can put together a powerful proposal and eloquently pitch for money. It is this group that, more often than not, benefits from funding and networking opportunities which means that much of the available money continues to move in the same established circles.

This is similar to a theme I remember first hearing spelled out explicitly by Echoing Green’s President, Cheryl Dorsey, at the StartingBloc Institute for Social Innovation in New York last year. Cheryl expressed pleasure at the skills and enthusiasm of the new breed of social entrepreneurs that have been flooding Echoing Green with applications in recent years. Yet, she also shared that a challenge Echoing Green has begun to face is finding ways to be inclusive of entrepreneurs who might not be as polished, but have ideas with lots of raw potential and deep insight into the communities they serve.

This is a valid concern. As Nathalie observed, if we only support people and ideas backed by detailed business plans and flashy PowerPoint presentations, we will miss out on the impact that could have been created by those that aren’t as good at using these tools. But the fact that we are seeing an influx of professional, polished entrepreneurs to the sector is something that we should be celebrating, not wringing our hands about.

We need to wrap our heads around the fact that this trend is not about to reverse itself anytime soon. Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner and others have suggested that a silver lining of the recession may be the release of the financial sector’s stranglehold on a huge stockpile of human capital, which will only accelerate the flow of talented professionals flocking to the social sector. We should be ecstatic to see a flood of well-educated, hard-working, polished, focused people of all ages directing their attention to protecting the environment, ending educational inequity, and becoming social entrepreneurs.

“Organic” social entrepreneurs and changemakers–that is, social sector participants that emerge from the communities they seek to serve–have the advantage of naturally understanding many of the needs and challenges facing their clients. “Professional” social entrepreneurs and changemakers–social sector participants who tend to have more academic or professional credentials, but lack first-hand knowledge of the communities they seek to serve–can also be taught to listen better to their service communities and integrate improved understanding of community needs into their ventures. It’s not really about who has the “opportunity” to be a social entrepreneur. It’s about making sure that the needs of vulnerable populations, of the people being served, are deeply understood and implemented into products and services.

We need effective organizations and interventions, but developing effective local organizations and small-scale interventions is not enough. If we want to fundamentally change the world and drastically reduce poverty, end world hunger, prevent the spread of pandemics, reverse climate change, and abolish slavery, it’s not enough to have a program that only reaches hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. We need interventions that reach millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of people.

The scale of this need is one reason why concepts like social franchising or microfranchising have been garnering attention in recent years. Franchising is all about replicability and scalability. A 2008 study by the International Franchise Association found that franchising is responsible for over $2.3 TRILLION in economic output, directly and indirectly creating one in seven jobs in the US. What is it going to take to get social sector interventions to create impact on that kind of scale? Who are the people we need leading and supporting organizations to get our sector to that place?

Professional social entrepreneurs don’t just make slick pitches. They are the people who would be building multi-national corporations and creating value for private sector interests, but instead have chosen to dedicate their talents and energy to addressing social issues. They don’t just form an insular network and channel available social sector resources within the same established circles. Their networks extend outside the sector, to people in financial institutions, law firms, consulting firms, Silicon Valley, offices of elected officials, government agencies, traditional media, and new media, and they draw on these networks to bring new resources into our sector. They have the talents, the resources, and the vision to affect social change on grand scale that is demanded.

We need to make sure professional social entrepreneurs are attuned to the realities of the communities they seek to serve. We need to make sure professional social entrepreneurs don’t blind us with buzz words and grandiose promises they can’t achieve. As long as we can do those things, bring ‘em on! There’s a lot of work to be done and we need all the help we can get.