When you hear people discuss the "value" of volunteering, they're usually talking the personal benefits of helping others — not only for the people or "cause" they're serving but often for themselves well.

Every day, we hear stories about how volunteers have stepped in to help someone else only to learn that the experience gave them a new perspective or a more fulfilling life. That goes for middle school students with no previous public service to retired seniors who have been volunteering their entire lives.

And, while it may seem crass, there's also the "value" of volunteering for getting into college. You hear all the time how admissions offices look for people who will "give back" or "make their contribution" to the university community, rather than simply show up, take classes and leave.

It may be uncomfortable to view public service as a way of getting something yourself and college admissions can boil down to a messy series of judgment calls for the admission officer. On the other hand, it's hard to ignore what competitive universities say about being involved in the community — or what they actually do when it's time to send those all-important acceptance letters.

When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published its profile for this year's entering freshmen, 95 percent — or roughly 3,762 of the 3,960 who enrolled — had participated in community service.

Volunteering has another important "value" as well, and that's the dollars and cents organizations save when people donate their services. Again, it may sound crass to view things this way, but church ministries and nonprofits simply couldn't do their essential work if they had to pay salaries for everyone involved in the effort; some, in fact, operate entirely with volunteers.

This hit home recently, when the United Way began its review to decide how contributions from the annual campaign will be allocated for the coming fiscal year. Some of the money was already designated by contributors for specific organizations, but most of it is sent where it can have the greatest impact in our community.

Those decisions are never made by the United Way staff. Instead, a group of community volunteers spends hours looking over applications from agencies requesting help, visiting all of the organizations to see how they're operating and then meeting to decide where to invest contributions in the community.

Obviously, that has a significant financial value and one that can be calculated, thanks to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, which has determined that the average value of a volunteer hour is $20.25. So, if you consider the amount of time each volunteer spends during the allocations project (18 hours), the number of volunteers involved (28) and the value of the hours they're contributing ($20.25), then the value for this one project, alone, is $10,206.

You can see how important volunteer service can be for any ministry or nonprofit. There's no way the United Way could afford to spend more than $10,000 to decide where contributions should go, as important as that is to guaranteeing that contributions are used wisely.

Now, consider a much larger operation. Counting volunteer hours is a challenging task, but director Teresa Dew estimates that volunteers with Christians United Outreach Center log about 300 hours each week providing food to needy local families and operating a thrift store, where people can find affordable items for their homes.

If you crunch these numbers, you come up with a huge figure. Volunteers contribute $6,075 worth of service every week. So you can only imagine how that adds up throughout the entire year — something in the neighborhood of $300,000 — or across the hundreds of other ministries and nonprofits operating locally.

It's worth taking time now and then to realize how important volunteers are, financially, to the organizations serving our neighbors. Few of the great things happening in our community could take place without dedicated people — who, in the end, aren't thinking so much about the financial value of their services, but the spiritual and practical value of the work they do.