\u201cA lot of them were not successful because they didn\u2019t have the support that we had in place at school,\u201d Heintzelman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She chose ice cream because she wanted a business with roles simple enough for employees to grow into multiple positions, and customers who\u2019d come in already happy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After training at Penn State\u2019s ice cream school and experimenting with a small batch freezer in her home kitchen, she started handing out samples. The reaction convinced her she had something.<\/p>\n
When she and Michael later added coffee, partly to keep the shop busy through slower winter months, and partly to extend the hours they could offer employees shifts, Get Joy\u2019s two-part identity was established.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/TANGORGANIZATIONPROFILE-3.jpg\")
Get Joy, founded by Sara and Michael Heintzelman, is an ice cream and coffee shop that opened this past June. The shop was created with the goal of giving people with different abilities a job and a training ground most workplaces don\u2019t offer. (Courtesy of Christa Neu)<\/p>\n
She said the hardest part wasn\u2019t the recipes \u2014 it was the building itself: making a space accessible for both customers and employees meant redesigning nearly everything from scratch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Each design choice was meant to make the shop somewhere employees and customers could navigate on their own, not just accommodate.<\/p>\n
Their deliberate design shows up in small choices throughout the shop: door handles at accessible heights, doors that open easily, numbered visual checklists behind the counter that guide employees through preparing drinks and tasks step by step.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe entire reason why this business needs to exist is because everyone else isn\u2019t doing what we\u2019re trying to do,\u201d Heintzelman said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0She said she pushed back on contractors who said the standard design would be cheaper and easier to build, rather than providing accessible accommodations.<\/p>\n
Every countertop sits at wheelchair height, lower than a typical shop, but standard equipment wouldn\u2019t fit underneath. The ice machine had to be replaced entirely. Casters were stripped off refrigeration units just to make them fit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A job coach brings special education students from a nearby school each week, specifically because Get Joy is one of the only places fully accessible enough for them to navigate independently.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The bathroom includes an adult-sized changing table, built after Heintzelman and her husband were moved by a video from Bethlehem native Shane Burcaw, who has spinal muscular atrophy, describing the indignity of having no safe option but the floor of a public restroom when he\u2019s outside the comfort of his own home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are giving people a space that they can navigate safely and appropriately,\u201d Heintzelman said.<\/p>\n
An equal amount of thought was put into the shop\u2019s hiring.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two Facebook posts advertising job opportunities at Get Joy brought in far more interest than Heintzelman expected, leading the shop to hire 42 people prior to opening.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For the first round of new hires, Sara and Michael drove to each person\u2019s house to deliver the news in person, with a balloon, a T-shirt and a water bottle. The second round got a party.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both groups went through an orientation covering Get Joy\u2019s mission and values, followed by training and a series of soft launch shifts before the doors opened to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some Joy Makers need step-by-step instruction guides only a few times before they can work independently. Others lean on it daily, with help from a mentor, like Frick, or one of the shop\u2019s Junior Joy Mentors, high school students interested in education who train alongside the Joy Makers and model the roles themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mackenzie Shoemaker, a high school sophomore and junior mentor, found the job through a Facebook post her mother shared, at an age when few employers would take a chance on her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of challenges with helping people with disabilities and people with different needs,\u201d Shoemaker said. \u201cIt\u2019s been a very big learning opportunity to learn how to help these people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shoemaker already had her sights on teaching. Working at Get Joy, she said, has only confirmed this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Frick arrived at Get Joy from the opposite direction. She was 32 years into a classroom career and considered retirement when a colleague\u2019s wife sent her a Facebook post about a new shop looking for mentors \u2014 she put in her retirement notice from her teaching career that March.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI can still be a part of something that I so firmly believe in, and I feel so strongly that it is needed,\u201d Frick said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now her mornings start at 6:30 a.m., earlier than her teaching days ever did, making coffee and setting up before the first customers arrive by 7 a.m.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What keeps her there, she said, are the small, visible signs of progress. A Joy Maker mastering a drink recipe without the checklist, remembering a regular\u2019s order or greeting a customer by name.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you see them doing it, it\u2019s what it\u2019s all about,\u201d Frick said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Heintzelman measures the shop\u2019s success, not in sales figures, but in relationships.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not something that\u2019s measured in a specific metric,\u201d Heintzelman said.<\/p>\n
For Frick, the relationships and joy showed up almost immediately.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy cheeks hurt from smiling,\u201d Frick said, speaking about her first week. \u201cEverybody embraced us.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The smell hits before the door opens.\u00a0 Waffle cones fresh off the iron curl into shape behind the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[5451,153,155,154,1197],"class_list":["post-312796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-5-minute-read","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-feature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}