Christian Bale has opened a $22 million foster care village built on a single rule – brothers and sisters who go into care do not get split up.
The actor cut the ribbon in Palmdale, California, alongside co-founder Eric Esrailian and community leaders, 18 years after he first started working on the idea.
The village, the first built by their charity Together California, is 12 fully furnished homes across six duplexes, each one designed to take a sibling group of up to six children.
Every home has a full-time, professionally trained foster parent living in it.
Asked why he had given two decades of his life to this, Bale kept the answer short.
“If you’ve got a heart, little human beings need help,” he said. “They’re alone in the world.”
“18 years in the making since the first idea of how to do it,” Bale said. “So it will be absolutely extraordinary when we come and see that central communal garden just full of kids playing.”
The site is laid out to feel like a neighborhood rather than an institution, with a communal garden, recreation areas and a community center.
A FOX 11 reporter could not let the obvious go and asked whether this was Batman to the rescue, a nod to the trilogy Bale led as Bruce Wayne.
He had thought about it, but only long after the fact.
“It wasn’t until a few years after I started this that I realized Bruce Wayne started an orphanage at the end of the movies,” he said.
