Academy Award-winning actor Christian Bale is turning a lifelong dream into reality with a new foster care village outside Los Angeles, designed to keep siblings from being separated. The project, called Together California, has been 17 years in the making and is now under construction in Palmdale, California.
A Dream Born from Family Concerns
The idea first came to Bale in the early 2000s, when his daughter was just three years old. He said he began to imagine what would happen if he and his wife, Sibi, were gone — and whether his daughter might be separated from her siblings in foster care. That led him to a troubling statistic: about 75 percent of children entering foster care in the United States are separated from their siblings.
“Imagine the trauma of that, you know? Being taken from your parents, and then you lose your siblings. That’s just something that we shouldn’t be doing,” Bale told CBS Sunday Morning in May.
Building Together California
In 2022, Together California secured $1.7 million from the City of Palmdale and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to purchase a 4.7-acre site. With designs by AC Martin Architects, the village will feature 12 three-bedroom townhomes, each housing up to six children under the care of trained foster parents.
The community will also include a 7,000-square-foot center for enrichment programs, a garden, and open spaces. Studio apartments will serve as temporary housing for birth parents and transitional spaces for teens aging out of the foster system. By August 2025, construction crews had already begun raising walls, transforming the once-empty desert lot into a growing community.
Support From Hollywood and Beyond
Bale partnered with physician and UCLA professor Dr. Eric Esrailian, along with foster housing expert Tim McCormick, to bring the project to life. Funding has come from both public and private donors, including $6 million from the Austrian-American Council West and contributions from actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Bale admitted to the Associated Press in 2024 that he once believed the process would be simple. “I didn’t think it was going to take that long. I had a very naive idea about getting a piece of land and then bringing kids in… like the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music.”
A Legacy Beyond Hollywood
Although Bale is best known for his roles in films such as The Dark Knight, The Fighter, and Ford v Ferrari, he has called Together California one of his greatest achievements. For him, it represents not only a personal dream realized but also a new model of compassion-driven foster care that could inspire similar projects nationwide.
“The walls are not all up yet, but the vision is clear: an innovative model of foster care filled with hope, connection, and love,” Together California shared on Instagram alongside a timelapse of construction progress.
For the thousands of children in California’s foster system, the project could mean the chance to grow up with the most important bond of all — their siblings.