Sweet Help 4 Disabled: Jake’s Ice Cream

Fox highlighted recent “National Ice Cream Day” by celebrating a shop in my Sweet Home Falls Church that “serves up opportunity by proudly employing 20 people with special needs.” BTW: The delicious creamy product is to live for…

My wife and I actually stumbled onto Jake’s Ice Cream a few blocks from our home since it’s nested inconspicuously in a strip mall and behind a bank facility. Yet, the rich ice cream flavors made on site and mostly by folks with disabilities is remarkably superior to a Baskin Robbins, Ben & Jerry’s or all those corporate wanna-bes. So, how’d this even come about and enough to catch Fox News’ attention? “The inspiration was my nephew Jake, who this place is named after,” owner Robin Rinearson told “Fox & Friends Weekend” two Sunday’s ago. “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 … They made no accommodations.”

Rinearson said she was “irritated” at seeing her nephew stay unemployed for a year-and-a-half and with prospects of the lockdown mentality not likely to change soon. “I had a long chat with my brother and I said, ‘Look, you and I have been very fortunate in our lives … We need to come up with a business for Jake and others like him that nobody can take away from them.” Hence, “Jake’s” a world that’s a little sweeter place to live in.

Davd Soul