'We must help our children': Christian Bale breaks ground on homes for foster care siblings

Before he played the orphan who would become Batman on the big screen, Christian Bale took up foster care as a cause. This week, he got to break ground on Los Angeles-area community to help house foster siblings.

The Welsh-born Bale and other supporters literally put shovels into the earth on Wednesday to begin construction of a 12-home foster care community with a 7,000-square-foot community center in Palmdale, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles. The city of Palmdale gave $1.2 million to Together California, the foster care community co-founded by Bale, his wife Sibi Bla?i?, and Eric Esrailian, producer of "The Promise," a 2016 film starring Bale.

The Oscar-winning Bale (2010's "The Fighter") and Esrailian, a health sciences clinical professor of medicine at UCLA, also contributed to and led a two-year fundraising effort, Together California said in a news release.

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How Christian Bale learned about the problem

Bale, who moved to California in the early 1990s, learned that Los Angeles County had a high concentration of foster children around 2008, when his own daughter was 3 years old and "The Dark Knight" had just been released, The Associated Press reported.

The fact that many brothers and sisters were separated in the foster care process drove him to act.

“I didn’t think it was going to take that long,” Bale told The Associated Press this week. “I had a very naive idea about kind of 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.’”

The project, which has an estimated cost of $22 million and is expected to be completed in April 2025, is “something absolutely new, totally transformative and something completely needed," Bale said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Imagine the absolute pain and the trauma of losing your parents or being torn from your parents, and then losing your brothers and sisters on top of that," Bale said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "That’s no way to treat kids. And so, we will be the hub for that. I hope that this village will be the first of many, and I hope that people, Californians and Angelenos, know to come join us in opening our eyes to what’s happening right under our noses. These are our children, and we must help our children.”

How Christian Bale's father inspired him to give back

Bale said his late father, David, inspired his charitable efforts.

"We were always having other people coming and living in our house who didn’t have homes, etcetera. That’s just the guy that he was," he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

"Foster care has always been an important issue to me and I’m aware of similar models in the U.S. and globally, and it’s been a goal to bring it to California," Bale said in a statement. "I’m thankful to my longtime partner Eric Esrailian and to so many people in our community for rallying to support these families for years to come."

Together California's model will have a full-time professionally trained foster parent caring for up to six children in each home.

“It is a dream come true for Christian and I to officially launch Together California with our partners and to start the process of change," Esrailian, who is also an entrepreneur and UCLA faculty member, said in a statement. "The loyal and generous support of donors and public officials has made it all possible and strengthens our mission to ensure brothers and sisters remain together in a single individual home."

Kathryn Barger, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors who helped with the groundbreaking, thanked the city of Palmdale for its contribution.

"Keeping siblings in foster care together in quality environments will undoubtedly bring life-changing stability to some of our most vulnerable youth," she said in a statement.

Contributing: The Associated Press

Follow Mike Snider on X and Threads: @mikesnider & mikegsnider.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Christian Bale spearheads foster Los Angeles foster care homes