Not all heroes wear capes or beat up psychotic clowns. Christian Bale is building foster homes to keep siblings together as they navigate the system. The project will also create a community center, all of which will be built in Los Angeles County.
The project has been in the making for 16 years. After the long process and fight to make the dream a reality, he stood in the city of Palmdale on Wednesday through a clearing in the storms that have been drowning California to celebrate with donors, politicians, and his wife, Sibi Bale.
Christian Bale Builds Foster Homes to Keep Siblings Together
The American Psycho actor has lived in L.A. since the ’90s. As he grew his own family and rose to Hollywood stardom, he learned about how many foster children in the county there were, including siblings being separated. He sought to make that change in 2008, the year The Dark Knight was released.
The plan for Christian Bale to build a foster home system to keep siblings together didn’t seem that it would “take that long,” which he told AP. He had “a very naive idea” of how to navigate accomplishing the project. He thought about “getting a piece of land and then, bringing kids in and the brothers and sisters living together and sort of singing songs like the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music.”
After learning that the process would be more complicated, he realized he needed to educate himself and gain momentum with some help. He visited Chicago to attend family and children service meetings. He found one of his biggest assistants, Tim McCormick, who had worked on something similar. McCormick would then join Together California, an organization that the actor formed with doctor Eric Esrailian.
With a team behind him, work started to move forward. Christian Bale and the team hired L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger to lead the foster home project. They then found Palmdale, a city of 165,000 people, to be the base for these homes and the community center that would anchor it.
The 12 homes and community center will be completed by April 2025.
