I pay little attention to what is called “news” when it focuses on the details of the private lives of celebrities. I don’t think that is any of my business, but I must confess that a recent announcement about Christian Bale caught my eye, and I tuned in. Christian Bale was Batman in The Dark Knight and played Vice President Dick Cheney in the eye-opener film “Vice.” Bale has been working on the idea of building a foster care community whose foundation is to keep siblings together who require care. For seventeen years Bale has been gathering resources and information to bring this project to life. Construction is underway.
In an interview earlier this year on CBS Sunday Morning, Bale explained how he came to this idea for foster children, having not been in foster care himself. His daughter was born in 2005, and he thought of other kids that weren’t so lucky to have a safe and stable home. “I don’t think you have to have any connection to foster care in your past,” Bale explained. “It’s just about the basic understanding that, as a society, how can you not take care of our children. So, I don’t think it requires a connection. It just requires having a heart.”
In his search for all the pieces that needed to come together to create this community, including a 4.7 acre parcel of land in Palmdale, east of Los Angeles, he met Tim McCormick, the CEO of a multi-site foster care system in Chicago where children live together with their siblings, receive care and support from a full-time Foster Parent who has been trained and licensed, with children living in a private, single-family home but receive support from the “Village.” Tim McCormick’s foster kids have a 100% success rate of completing high school, compared to the national average of less than 50%. “Of the 400,000 kids in foster care, only 3 percent get a college education,” McCormick explained. “This site is about creating a place for authentic goodness to flourish, and it certainly impacts the children but impacts all of us when we create a different story.” McCormick shared his experience and wisdom with Bale to help him create “Together California.”
Bale and his partners, the University of California and Dr. Eric Esrailian, brought this project to life, with the help of donors such as Leonardo DiCaprio. Construction is well underway with hopes of welcoming children by December or early in 2026. Bale has had many successes in his acting career, but this project is the one he is most proud of. “When I’m closing my eyes for the last time I want to look and say did I do some good, did I make any changes in the world that were useful.”
Canada doesn’t have any similar foster care projects like Bale’s that I could find, but Canadian child welfare agencies do recognize the importance of keeping siblings together. In 2021/2022, according to the Canadian government, 61,104 children in Canada were in foster care. More than half of these children are Indigenous while representing less than 8 percent of the total population of children under 15. Where there is poverty, there are struggles. The Canadian government implemented the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2019 with Bill C-92: An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, recognizing Indigenous communities must have jurisdiction over their children and family services, to keep children within their communities, providing for the Village approach to care and support for vulnerable children.
“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” said John F. Kennedy. I wonder what message we Canadians are sending to the future.
wendistewart@live.ca
