In February 2009 EHFA convened a round table bringing senior European Commission officials together with representatives of the health and fitness sector - operators, national associations and the association's own technical bodies.
The meeting was reported in a press release dated 25 February 2009, whose full text was carried as an attachment. It followed the association's second EU policy forum, held in Brussels on 11 February, by a fortnight.
Round tables of this kind were the association's most direct form of advocacy, and they were necessary because the sector had no standing channel into European policy. Fitness was not covered by the sport mandate, which in any case had no budget for vocational training, and it was not a recognised part of the health workforce for policy purposes. The association's case was that the sector was already delivering physical activity at scale and that recognising its qualifications was the cheapest way to make that delivery count.
A meeting also did something a written answer could not. Consultation responses are read as one interest among many; a round table put operators and national associations in front of the officials drafting the rules, which is where the sector could describe the reach it already had instead of arguing for recognition in the abstract.
The same argument ran through the association's responses to consultations on vocational education and tax, and through its later work on the sector pledge. See European affairs.