ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — She slides open the window from inside the bus.
“Hello hello! How’s it going today?” Emily Danciu-Grosso asks the young man outside, over the buzz of the engine, the sweet scent of ice cream wafting out. She’s wearing mismatched sparkly earrings, one a stop sign and the other a school bus.
“Are you thinking an iced coffee today?”
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He nodded with a lopsided smile, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. The man works at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital through a program that connects people with disabilities to competitive employment. Danciu-Grosso’s mobile ice cream bus, Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Love, sits just outside. People with disabilities, like him, stop by the bus to order, as do families and other passersby.
Danciu-Grosso turned to pour ice and coffee into a cup. She added Lucky Charms and extra sugar, how he likes it.
She’s been running the mobile business since this spring, and is planning to offer a job training program for people with disabilities on the bus, to help them build skills like organization, hygiene and customer service.
She quit her job in disability services, and her husband, Johnny Ilie, quit his job as a yacht captain to build the business. They spent years searching for the right bus and experimenting with recipes.
Establishing her business as for-profit was important to Danciu-Grosso. Nonprofits that employ people disabilities can sometimes be seen as doing it out of pity, she said.
But she’s never thought of people with disabilities that way.
Especially not her sister.
A menu that works
Danciu-Grosso didn’t think Noelle was all that different when they were kids growing up in South Florida.
Her older sister, who was born with an intellectual and developmental disability, was adopted as a baby. They celebrated their birthdays together every December with a snow machine in the front yard. They took turns giving hugs and kisses to the foster children their mother cared for.
Her mom teased both girls the same and never gave Noelle special treatment. But Danciu-Grosso remembers her mom having frustrating conversations with her sister’s teachers, trying to convince them that she shouldn’t be sent home for behavior she couldn’t control. She felt protective when neighborhood kids made comments about her sister’s appearance or mannerisms.
“I just always knew that everything that maybe came easy to me was that much harder for Noelle,” she said.
Danciu-Grosso also saw her sister’s job opportunities grow slimmer as she got older. Vocational rehabilitation agencies said her sister would never be fully independent because she can’t manage her diabetes on her own. Noelle tried volunteer roles but hasn’t had paid work. And even if she did, she couldn’t make more than roughly $11 per hour if she wanted to stay eligible for disability benefits.
Noelle is among the 75% of people with disabilities not in the workforce, compared to 30% of those without disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. People with disabilities fall off a metaphorical cliff when they turn 21, Danciu-Grosso said, because they’ve aged out of programs available to them as children and teenagers.
Danciu-Grosso taught yoga, cooking classes and other services to people with disabilities in North Carolina for many years. Access to job training provides people with disabilities, like her sister, with a sense of purpose and confidence, she said.
“I’ve always come back to employment,” she said, “as the most essential skill that you can teach.”
So she got to work.
Her business needed to be mobile, so she could go out into the community, not rely on people to find her. It needed to teach soft skills like customer service, hand-washing and organization. It needed to sell a product that can be easily organized and prepared, like loaded potatoes.
They’d offer a solid work system for individuals with disabilities, Danciu-Grosso remembers thinking. Slice the middle open, add butter, spread sour cream, crumble bacon bits and sprinkle cheese and chives. She looked for inspiration at loaded potato shops, and found them empty.
Maybe potato balls? She tried every ball recipe she could find and made up ones she thought might work. Meatballs, falafel, stuffed cheese balls.
After her husband’s birthday dinner a few years ago, she laid out cereal krispies and pushed them together. She scooped some strawberry ice cream on top, prayed she could mold the krispies around it before it melted and stuck it in the freezer. Everyone widened their eyes when they took a bite.
That’s it, Danciu-Grosso thought. Now she just needed to find a bus.
Taking the wheel
Danciu-Grosso didn’t know the stigma around the short bus until she became a professional in the disability services world.
It’s a reference to handicap-accessible buses that often transport students with disabilities to and from school. There’s often a negative connotation, she said.
She wanted to turn the short bus, which was already accessible for people with disabilities, into a fun place.
She and Ilie spent years looking for the perfect bus, and found it through an online auction two years ago. Repairs and upgrades cost more than the bus itself.
Ilie tore out the seats, installed metal on the ceiling, put in freezers and an air conditioning unit, camouflaged by a giant ice cream ball sculpture.
The lettering on top reads “alls of love” since the “b” fell off. Danciu-Grosso thinks it’s fitting.
Earlier this year, Danciu-Grosso partnered with the city of St. Petersburg’s therapeutic recreation division to lead a career exploration workshop, where she trained 50 young adults with disabilities. She wants to create a comprehensive job training program, and she’s also exploring a new model, where families pay for a loved one to go through her career readiness training on the bus.
And she’s considering trademarking the original ice cream ball.
People have opened up bakeries or coffee shops that hire individuals with disabilities, said Taryn Kidd, Danciu-Grosso’s former colleague in the disability services field. But she thinks Danciu-Grosso’s business is unique.
“Having a program like Emily’s that starts from the bottom — hygiene, dress to impress for interviews, interview skills, and just like every little gamut that it takes to be employed,” she said, “I think that’s the very first step of living the life that you want to live.”
The summer heat has made business tricky. Not one person stopped by the ice cream bus at a Madeira Beach market a few weeks ago. Danciu-Grosso says their event schedule is ramping up in the next few months, though.
Ilie said he often hears Danciu-Grosso on the phone with her sister after a rough day of work. Danciu-Grosso has a tattoo of one of her sister’s mantras on her forearm as a reminder to keep going when life gets difficult.
“You live,” it reads in cursive.
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