Bananas Foster describes itself as “the official non-profit of Banana Ball,” the barnstorming baseball league that hosts the Savannah Bananas. Its mission, per executive director Jolie Chabala, is “celebrating the foster care community, while educating and inspiring others to get involved.” It’s not so sharply defined a mission, but what Bananas Foster has going for it is attention: The Bananas have become a viral sensation, and Banana Ball—soon to be rechristened the Banana Ball Championship League—is set to grow in 2026 by 50 percent, from four to six teams. Bananas Foster is featured prominently on the websites of both the league and its marquee team, and the Bananas run a Bananas Foster promotion at all of their exhibitions, which tend to sell out everywhere they go. Bananas Foster raises funds from individual donors. “We are completely donor-based, meaning that we do not do any type of grant-writing” says Chabala, who proposes that this allows her organization to avoid competing for resources with other non-profits working within the foster system. “I don’t want these organizations to feel threatened by Bananas Foster.”
The Bananas Foster proposition has it that tens of thousands of people are gathered together in a baseball stadium for a Banana Ball exhibition, and the vast majority of them are not involved in what Chabala calls “the foster care community.” Bananas Foster captures that attention and redirects it, and reaps a reward for its cause in the form of tangible engagement. The readiest form of tangible engagement is a donation: Bananas Foster solicits donations from its paying audience during its in-game promotions. For some number of those people—probably a majority—that will be their last charitable interaction with the foster system. For some of them, that act of giving will check the box for Doing Good In The World for some too-long span of time.
Still, if Bananas Foster gets people to donate money in support of a struggling foster system, that’s not nothing. In 2024, its second year of operation, Bananas Foster reported $290,000 in total revenue, including $235,000 in contributions. A sizable chunk of that, as you might expect, goes to staffing. The organization had two paid staffers in 2024, who together made about $110,000 in compensation. You need people to do the job of running a non-profit, and those people deserve to be paid for their labor, and these salaries are a long way short of exorbitant. The real test of the purpose and efficacy of a non-profit is in how that labor is directed.
Bananas Foster runs two programs. The smaller of the two, in terms of cost and logistical burden, is called Potassium CARE Baskets. These are care packages distributed by the charity to foster families in need. “Created with essential needs, Bananas swag, and personalized items for each family member,” reads the Bananas Foster website.
According to Chabala, “personalized items” covers a lot of ground. “We had somebody reach out to us, they only take teenagers. They got a call for a newborn baby who is the sibling of one of the teenagers in their home. She called me, and said, ‘I don’t know what to do, I haven’t had a baby in my home in over 20 years, I don’t have anything to take care of this child, I feel stuck, I need support,'” Chabala described to Defector. “We heard that and we immediately went into action. Their Potassium CARE Basket was newborn clothes and a carseat, and a crib, and crib-sheets, and formula. We personalize that basket to the needs of the family.” In another example, Chabala says Bananas Foster provided a family with “everything that they would need” to establish rapport with a teenage girl, to include friendship bracelets, a journal, art supplies, and board games.
This program constitutes the direct support that Bananas Foster provides to foster families. “When people donate to Bananas Foster,” says Chabala, “we say that it is going to support the foster care community, and supporting the foster care community is through these Potassium CARE Baskets.” The 990 form reviewed by Defector indicates that the organization distributed 70 of these care packages in 2024, at a cost of $13,770, or a little bit less than $200 per basket. For frame of reference, this is approximately as much as Bananas Foster reported spending in 2024 on information technology.
The other program run by Bananas Foster is called Go Bananas for Game Day. This program is the manifestation of the organization’s mission to “uplift and shine a positive light” on people engaged in foster care. For this program, Bananas Foster invites a foster family to a Banana Ball game for what Chabala calls a “full VIP experience,” including a behind-the-scenes tour, some team merchandise, and a trip down to the field, where the family’s story is shared with the crowd and they are “celebrated in the middle of the show.” According to the company’s tax filing, 792 individuals were recipients of this service in 2024, at a cost to Bananas Foster of $52,127.
“It costs about $500 a family to come out to the games,” said Chabala, during her initial conversation with Defector on August 21, explaining the Bananas Foster pitch to would-be donors. “Because, again, we’re a separate entity from the Savannah Bananas, so the tickets and the merchandise and all of that, that comes from Bananas Foster.” Going by this description from Chabala, Bananas Foster—the official non-profit of Banana Ball, the corporate parent of the Savannah Bananas—uses donor funds to purchase tickets and merchandise from the Savannah Bananas, in order to invite guests to Savannah Bananas baseball games. This piece of information is backed up by the non-profit’s 2024 Form 990:
Scrolling down the Summary section of the filing, Bananas Foster shows about $290,000 in total revenue, and then about $67,000 outgoing in grants and assistance, about $110,000 outgoing in salary, and then another $22,000 outgoing in other expenditures, totaling about $200,000 in expenses. There does not appear to be another form of assistance going to the foster community, at least not in monetary or equivalent form.
This becomes more puzzling the more you learn about Bananas Foster. The organization’s founder and principal officer is a woman named Emily Cole. Emily Cole and her yellow-suit-wearing husband, Jesse Cole, are the owners of a private company called Fans First Entertainment. Fans First Entertainment is the corporate parent of Banana Ball, and owns the league’s teams. Jesse Cole has installed himself as the league’s commissioner.
A non-profit might be credibly accused of self-dealing for using donor dollars to purchase goods from its own founder’s private company. When this 990 was presented to a representative of the charity watchdog group Charity Watch, that person flagged this part of the report as particularly troubling, noting that another section of the document records only about $4,900 in donated in-kind goods. There is the matter of tickets to a baseball game only very loosely and indirectly relating to the mission of the charity, and then there is the matter of the owners of the Savannah Bananas seeming to benefit directly from purchases made by a non-profit that they founded and control.
When pressed on this matter, Jolie Chabala seemed to backtrack on her earlier statement, about Bananas Foster paying $500 per family in ticket and merchandise costs for each Go Bananas for Game Day promotion. “People are like, ‘Well am I paying Bananas Foster to then just go back and pay the Savannah Bananas?’ The answer is no. The Bananas do see that as an in-kind donation, so we’re not putting money back into Banana Ball. They are kind enough to say, ‘OK, we will donate those tickets as an in-kind donation to Bananas Foster.’ Same thing with the merchandise as well. We are not putting money back into their pockets.”
This does not appear to be reflected in the Bananas Foster 990, which shows $52,127 in non-cash assistance being provided to 792 recipients in 2024 in the form of “game tickets and merchandise.” When asked to account for what this money was actually spent on, if not Savannah Bananas tickets and merchandise, Ms. Chabala (who did not prepare the 990) theorized that this amount might reflect other expenses related to hosting foster families at Savannah Bananas games.
“Looking at our program, being that $52,000, that would be additional costs to the foster families,” explained Chabala. “We try to also equate that every foster family we celebrate also gets a quote-unquote Potassium CARE Basket, so usually we give them a gift card. Because when you come to a baseball game, there are added costs. There’s costs of parking, there’s costs of water, there’s costs of food, and we want to make sure that everything is covered for these families, but also we can’t be with them all the time to pay for stuff on a corporate credit card.” Chabala says that it is her custom to use her corporate credit card to, for example, purchase bottles of water for the invited families, in advance of their arrival for game day. At 792 recipients, this works out to about $66 per person per game, which is not at all an unreasonable amount for, say, food and beverages and parking at a live sporting event.
Even if you accept this explanation, it sort of raises the question of why this expense—the cost of being a good host to someone that you have invited to your own place, to an event that you control, and one from which you will turn a huge profit—needs to be borne by donors who are hoping their dollars will go to improving conditions in the foster system.
Defector next contacted the organization’s Chief Financial Officer, a person named Sarah Trumler, on the advice of Ms. Chabala. Ms. Trumler told Defector via email that she is a part-time volunteer for Bananas Foster, and is “by no means a non-profit expert.” She also said that “earlier this year” Bananas Foster contracted with a new accounting firm, and indicated that this firm would be in charge of answering our questions about the filing. Defector was then contacted by Erin Sparks of CliftonLarsonAllen, a national accounting firm. Ms. Sparks says that Bananas Foster “reached out to CLA in mid-August, seeking nonprofit consulting services,” and that the headline item on the agenda was “the need to amend the 990.” Any date of first contact in mid-August of this year would’ve been within days of Defector’s first contact with Bananas Foster, which took place on August 20. Defector sent a series of questions to CLA, but has not received any response.
In a follow-up email sent Sept. 12, Chabala now adopted the language of Ms. Trumler, and emphasized that Bananas Foster is still learning how to operate as a charity. “I’d like to reiterate that Bananas Foster is a new nonprofit,” she says, by way of an explanation. “Any amendments made to the 2024 990 form will be simply to align the data with the correct cell or line on the form to accurately capture the specific 2024 activities that were appropriately handled.” Chabala says that Bananas Foster actually received approximately $55,000 in in-kind donations in the form of “jerseys/merchandise, tickets to games, staff travel, and general administrative overhead” from the Savannah Bananas; since that number cannot be found in the appropriate section of the original filing, extending Chabala the benefit of the doubt means allowing that this was reported improperly. The sum would more than cover for the $52,127 spent by Bananas Foster to host foster families at Savannah Bananas baseball games. “No donor dollars were paid to the Savannah Bananas,” reiterates Chabala, in her email, “and all donations are used to support the nonprofit’s mission and those in the foster care community.”
If all of this turns out to be an innocent failure of accounting—if the tickets and merchandise parts of this promotion are indeed being donated by the club—not all of the relevant questions will have been answered, at least not satisfactorily. How is Inviting People To Savannah Bananas baseball games essential to the mission of a nonprofit ostensibly working to improve conditions in the foster system? What is a nonprofit with a vague mission and a part-time, non-expert CFO doing soliciting and accepting donations? What does a nonprofit that provides just $13,000 in direct aid need with hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions, especially if the rest of its assistance is covered by in-kind donations? For that matter, why is Bananas Foster still soliciting donations at all, when they ended 2024 with more than $90,000 in unspent revenue, and with a total of $183,000 in net assets?
Chabala offered to share a revised 2024 Form 990 with Defector, once it is completed.
The Bananas blew up in 2025. Chabala says that the waitlist for Banana Ball tickets is up to three million people; the flagship Bananas sold out Yankee Stadium over the weekend. The league is expanding; its games are being broadcast on national television; its more choreographed moments regularly circle the internet several times over as viral highlight clips. My non-baseball-watching nephew recently asked me what I was working on and I mentioned an accounting question about a minor-league baseball team, the kind of thing that under most circumstances would cause the eyes of an average teen to glaze right over. Not this time! He brought up the Savannah Bananas. He knew them and had seen the highlights and thinks they are cool.
There is a problem that I think is general to our chewed and re-chewed world. Powerful people often have the idea that other people’s money will naturally find its most productive use if it is moved into their own pockets. The Coles, to their credit, are certified and active foster parents, and it’s clear they and Chabala care authentically about the foster system. Because the Coles own an immensely popular baseball team, they could very easily march themselves down onto the pitcher’s mound after every performance of the National Anthem and lecture the crowd about the needs of a desperately under-resourced social program. They could donate 100 percent of ticket proceeds from a given game, or concession proceeds, or the proceeds from special Bananas Foster merchandise, to any number of causes assisting foster families. Hell, they could also put QR codes all over the place and take donations hand over fist, but then turn immediately around and pass those donations along to the whole galaxy of serious nonprofits already working in the sector, in consultation with their state’s Department of Human Services.
The record currently shows that they instead spend less than five percent of their revenue on direct aid to foster families, and less than a fifth of their revenue hosting one family at a time at their baseball games. When pressed on this, their explanation is that their CFO is unqualified and that they don’t have much experience with this. Not everyone should be running a donor-funded nonprofit, is what I’m saying. Some people—the people who have lots of money, say, because they own an entire baseball league—should stick to spending their own money, instead.
Bananas Foster had almost no very convincing use for a haul of donor contributions when they were linked to a quirky small-time—or perhaps medium-time—minor-league operation. They are still soliciting donations and still running their programs; if their revenue expands in relation to the popularity of the baseball team, 2025 will have been a banner year for the charity. How much of that money ends up directly and meaningfully benefiting foster families will depend on how much Bananas Foster is prepared to modify its efforts.