J.B. Schramm, founder of College Summit, which partners with school districts to help low-income students through the college application process.

Social entrepreneurship has arrived as a significant public policy tool, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks in today’s piece, “Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders.

Brooks queues up the next big challenge for social entrepreneurs: “Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?”

And he points to one possible solution.

“America Forward, a consortium of these entrepreneurs, wants government to do domestic policy in a new way. It wants Washington to expand national service (to produce more social entrepreneurs) and to create a network of semipublic social investment funds. These funds would be administered locally to invest in community-run programs that produce proven results. The government would not operate these social welfare programs, but it would, in essence, create a network of semipublic Gates Foundations that would pick winners based on stiff competition.

Civic Ventures, publisher of Encore.org, is working with America Forward, to address the problem of scalability and to press for a vastly expanded and transformed national service initiative.

Indeed, the hundreds of older social innovators recognized through The Purpose Prize, another project of Civic Ventures, represent one way to expand the pool of social innovation, by investing in older social entrepreneurs as well as younger ones.

“We are working to assure that this movement fully values the contribution of what until recently has been the undiscovered continent of older social innovators,” said Jim Emerman, director of the Purpose Prize.