Virginia ice cream shop employs adults with disabilities
Jake's Ice Cream owner Robin Rinearson joined 'Fox & Friends Weekend' alongside employees Tim Walker and Sara Canterbury to discuss the effort to help those within the community.
An ice cream parlor in Virginia is serving up opportunities for adults with disabilities.
Jake’s Ice Cream in the city of Falls Church, located in Fairfax County, has employed more than 20 adults with special needs.
"The inspiration was my nephew Jake, who this place is named after," owner Robin Rinearson told "Fox & Friends Weekend" on Sunday morning.
"Jake is 29 years old. He’s got cerebral palsy. He had a job for eight years working for a company with 17 other young adults with disabilities. And when COVID hit, that company basically remained open, but they sent all the 18 people with special needs home," Rinearson said.
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"They made no accommodations."
Rinearson said she was irritated at seeing her nephew remain unemployed for a year-and-a-half.
With the COVID-19 pandemic still around, Rinearson worried that conditions wouldn’t improve fast enough for Jake to return to work with his former employer.
"I had a long chat with my brother, and I said, ‘Look, you and I have been very fortunate in our lives,'" Rinearson recalled.
"'We need to come up with a business for Jake and other people like him that nobody can take away from them,'" she also said.
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The family came across the ice cream parlor — and moved forward with opening one in Jake’s honor.
It wound up being in Falls Church, Virginia, about 12 miles from Washington, D.C.
"It doesn’t really matter what their diagnosis is. I have an expectation that there’s nothing difficult in this business."
Rinearson retired from her optometry practice in Bailey’s Crossroads and opened Jake’s Ice Cream in August 2021.
"It’s been a ton of fun," Rinearson told "Fox & Friends Weekend." "The first 11 people that I hired were actually out of my patient base."
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Tim Walker and Sara Canterbury are two of the two dozen employees Rinearson has at Jake’s Ice Cream, and they joined her during the TV segment.
Robin Rinearson, the owner of Jake's Ice Cream shop in Falls Church, Virginia, joined "Fox and Friends Weekend" alongside her employees, Tim Walker (right) and Sara Canterbury (left). (Fox News Media)
"These two have been my patients since they were little kids," Rinearson said.
Walker runs the store’s cash register and scoops ice cream.
"It’s a great work environment," he told "Fox & Friends Weekend."
"Everyone feels like family. Great people to work with."
Canterbury added that she has a lot of friends at work and enjoys working with a partner.
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Employees at Jake’s Ice Cream vary in ability, according to Rinearson.
"There are kids on the autism spectrum, there are kids with cerebral palsy like Jake, there are kids with Down syndrome, there are kids with goldenhar syndrome, with fourth chromosome deletion — there’s just a huge variety of things," she said.
Rinearson continued, "It doesn’t really matter what their diagnosis is. I have an expectation that there’s nothing difficult in this business. So everybody needs to learn how to do everything."
Work responsibilities include making and scooping ice cream, creating cake pops, building waffle cones and operating the register.
Jake’s Ice Cream has 28 flavors of ice cream available along with confections and cakes.
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The brand’s tagline is "Crafted with Pride by Loving Hands."
"Now for some of these young adults, it’s a long, steep learning curve, but you know what? They can do it," Rinearson said.
"They can absolutely do it. And if they can’t do it themselves, we pair them up with a buddy, and they get help."
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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities was around 10.1% in 2021.
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