Registration opened on 18 August 2011 for the EHFA Brussels Summit, the second the association held in Brussels. The summit ran from 6 to 8 November 2011.
The summit was the association's annual occasion for putting the sector in front of the European institutions rather than in front of itself. Brussels was the point of it: the officials who dealt with vocational training, taxation, health and sport all worked in the same city, and the summit was organised so that the industry's case was made to them directly by the operators and national bodies that would have to act on whatever came back. The previous year's event, in London, had combined that argument with the release of the Becoming the Hub findings and the public pledge the sector signed there.
The case the summit carried was the one the association had made since it opened its Brussels office at the end of 2007. Fitness sat between sport, which had a basis in the treaties, and health, which had a strategy and a budget; the sector that delivered exercise to the most people was in neither. The association argued that exercise professionals are part of the health workforce, and that qualifications referenced to a common framework are what make them countable as such. See events and European affairs.