EHFA Update

EHFA Update was the association's newsletter, written for its members and published from 2008 to 2011. Seventeen issues appeared in that time, numbered from No. 001/2008 to No. 017/2011, and the numbering records the pattern: six issues in the first year of publication, three in 2009, and four in each of 2010 and 2011.

A newsletter was necessary because the association's members were spread across Europe and met as a body once a year, at the general assembly. Everything that happened in between - a standards document reaching a milestone, a register alliance being signed, a project reporting, a consultation closing - had to reach members some other way.

The stated remit was broad. Items covered anything related to the health and fitness industry, including developments at European level, features on the work the association had in hand, and the activities of members themselves. Members were invited to send their own news in for inclusion, and a subscription form was published for readers who wanted the newsletter.

That remit describes the association's own working year. Across the period the newsletter ran, EHFA was negotiating a qualifications framework with national bodies, spending European funding on the vocational education work behind it, and building a register that had to be recognised country by country. Each of those produced something a member had to act on: a draft to comment on, a decision taken at a meeting the member had not attended, a deadline for the accreditation of a training programme.

The invitation to members ran the other way as well, and it is the reason the archive describes the newsletter as carrying members' activities rather than only the secretariat's. A national association that had won recognition for a qualification at home, or a training provider whose programme had been accredited, had news that other members needed: it showed how far the framework had reached in each market, and what the association's decisions looked like when they were applied.

The archive lists the issues rather than their contents, so what survives is the run itself: a continuous publication that followed the association through the years in which its qualifications framework, its register and its EU-funded projects were all being built. The last issue on the list, No. 017/2011, is also recorded in the news archive.

Read alongside the other channels, the newsletter closes the gap between them. The press releases were written for the media and the news items for the record, while EHFA Update went to members directly, carrying the same developments in more detail and earlier. The standards and register work it followed is set out under standards and EREPS, and what membership of the association involved is on the membership page.