Autumn Scarf Dinners are postponed

Monday 16 March 2020

Scarf and our fabulous restaurant partner for the upcoming season, Stomping Ground Beer Hall, have together made the difficult decision to postpone Autumn Scarf Dinners until further notice. 

With increasing advice to practice social distancing to help prevent the rapid spread of COVID-19, and this morning's announcement from the Victorian government declaring a state of emergency, this decision is the only one which makes sense. 

At Scarf, it's incredibly important that our staff, volunteers, trainees and diners are as safe as possible during this time of uncertainty, and we want to do our part as a community to ensure we're minimising the risk for those who are most vulnerable. 

Stomping Ground, like all hospitality venues, are bracing for a very challenging period, but they're a committed Scarf sponsor - along with partnering with us for Scarf Dinner seasons, they also support us with donated beer, and run awesome training sessions and brewery tours for our trainees. We hope to be able to run this season with Stomping Ground down the line. For now though, it is simply not possible for us to go ahead with our Autumn program as planned. 

One of the most challenging things for us as an organisation will be to support the eight trainees who have recently signed up for the Autumn Scarf '20 program - this is something we may ask for your help with, a little further down the track.

For now, we have let our new trainees know that this week's planned program induction, Scarf Dinners and all face to face training sessions have been postponed until further notice. Our small team will be working hard to develop some ideas for starting the program in a 'virtual' way. This might utilise our partnership with Typsy (who have some really great online training resources) or other avenues to allow the new trainees to begin their Scarf experience online while we wait out this period.

We'll be exploring ways to create a connected online community for the Autumn Scarf '20 cohort, which may include opportunities to bring some of our incredible volunteer trainers and mentors into the mix too. We'll provide an update on this in the coming weeks.

This is obviously an unprecedented situation for Scarf and we'll do our best to be responsive and ensure that our new trainees are able to begin their Scarf experience in a positive, practical and beneficial way, despite the challenge of not being able to gather together in a physical space.