RAF MILDENHALL, England — Christina Steinmann is such a fixture at the Family Support Center at RAF Mildenhall that customers assume she is an employee.

She’s not. The 30 to 40 hours she provides the center each week are gratis. She’s a volunteer.

“I do have other volunteers, but Chris is my most dedicated one,” said Hope Friske, family services coordinator.

These are busy times at the center. The base has nearly 500 people currently deployed, adding to the normal workload of the center. So the importance of volunteers has increased.

“If I didn’t have Chris helping me out …” Friske said, not wanting to even say the words.

For Steinmann, wife of Senior Airman Daniel Steinmann of the 352nd Maintenance Squadron, volunteering is preferable to working.

“I feel like it’s something I have to do,” she said. “You get a lot more respect when you volunteer. People appreciate what you do.”

She’s worked in nearly every section of the center, from answering telephones at the front desk to helping with paperwork for families going through a permanent change of station. With the high operations tempo, she’s been busy putting together packets of information and coupons for spouses of deployed troops.

She helped organize a session for spouses to learn about the military and then took it herself.

Volunteers like Steinmann are critical, not only to the Family Support Center, but to the entire base, said Adrianna Domingos-Lupher, the coordinator for volunteers at the base.

“The spirit of volunteering at Mildenhall is very strong,” she said. “I would say a third of the base is involved in volunteering in one form or another.”

U.S. Air Forces in Europe created the Hidden Heroes program more than a year ago to shed light on volunteers. Domingos-Lupher said the program emphasizes a spirit that already existed, highlighting volunteerism as part of the “whole person” concept.

She said more than 600 people are registered with the program at RAF Mildenhall, although that’s only a fraction of the true volunteer force at the base. In the first three months of this year, those registered volunteers provided 10,000 hours of volunteer time, saving the base about $1.8 million.

“I would venture it’s much more,” she said.

Steinmann and her husband did volunteer work at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., she said. That set her on the volunteer track.

“Financially, we get by,” she said. As long as that remains true, she’ll continue to volunteer instead of seeking a paying job.

Asked what she and her husband do with their free time, Steinmann said they want to find opportunities to volunteer together on weekends.

“My husband,” she said, “loves to volunteer.”