ASTA Names Steve Powers Area Director For The East Coast
by Cheryl Rosen /
ASTA has named Steve Powers as its new area director for the East Coast, covering the states from Maine to Florida as well as Puerto Rico.
Many ASTA chapters cover a number of states, making it “a challenge for their volunteer leaders to cover” everything. So the idea behind this newly created position is “to take a cue from the NACTA model and try to encourage volunteers to step up in the under-represented areas,” as well as help new chapters flourish and grow, Powers told TMR.
In just the past few weeks ASTA already has added one new chapter on the East Coast and two more are “filing the paperwork.”
As the past president of the Long Island chapter and former chair of the Chapter Presidents Council (a position for which he plans to run again), not to mention his day job as president of Hidden Treasure Tours on Long Island, Powers certainly seems like the right man for the position.
“I’m very familiar with what’s involved and the challenges at hand,” he said. “I’ve always felt that ASTA’s success relies on its ability to remain relevant to grass-roots members within in the chapter system; that’s our first line of defense. We hear about the local issues and work with headquarters to send representatives to testify at hearings, and also we all work very hard to raise money for the ASTA PAC, to work with our politicians on the local and national levels.”
Powers has been an ASTA member since 1999, when he read an article in the local paper about how the LI ASTA chapter was planning a rally at JFK over a consumer-protection issue.
“One of the undersold things about ASTA is that it is an organization that not only protects its members, but most of the issues we deal with on the national level are on behalf of consumers,” he noted.
For the coming year, his priorities will be “to show the value of ASTA membership, and to reach out to consumers more. That’s certainly been a goal of ASTA but it’s difficult because speaking to consumers is very expensive.”