The Together California foster village in Palmdale, California, has officially opened its doors, the result of 18 years of planning and a fundraising effort that reached $22 million, according to The New York Times. The facility is built around a single, defining purpose: keeping sibling groups together when they enter the state care system.
Welsh actor Christian Bale has been the public face of the project from its earliest stages, and his involvement goes well beyond celebrity endorsement. He and his wife Sibi became engaged with the challenges facing children in California’s foster system after the birth of their first daughter. Contemplating what would happen to her if they suddenly died led them to look more closely at how the state handles children placed into care. What they found troubled them: most siblings entering the system are separated and grow up apart from one another.
What the Together California Foster Village Is Built to Do
The Together California foster village sits on a 4.67-acre property purchased in 2022, comprising 12 fully-furnished housing units across 11,000 square feet. The New York Times reports the village is designed to accommodate up to 72 children and their caregivers at a time, making it one of the most purposefully scaled responses to sibling separation in the country.
Bale described the gap the facility is meant to fill in plain terms. ‘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. That’s no way to treat kids, and so, we will be the hub for that,’ he told the Hollywood Reporter. At the opening, he returned to the same theme: ‘It’s our job to turn their heartbreak and their pain into love and hope and a sense of future.’
Los Angeles County has more children in foster care than anywhere else in the United States, a scale that makes the problem harder to solve and the need for dedicated infrastructure more pressing. ‘With LA County having more kids in foster care than anywhere else in America, it’s time we stand together and take a holistic, loving, and long-term approach to take better care of our children,’ Bale said at the opening.
Funding, Partners and the Road to Opening
The project did not arrive at its ribbon-cutting quickly or easily. Those 18 years of planning covered everything from concept to construction, and bringing it to completion required a broad coalition of supporters. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on 7 February 2024, less than two years before the village opened.
Funding came from multiple directions. ABC reported that the Austrian American Council West alone raised over $9 million for the project. Philanthropist and Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio also donated to it. Together, contributions pushed the total raised to $22 million, per The New York Times.
The village’s landing in Palmdale was also shaped by local political will. UCLA Professor and Together California co-founder Eric Esrailian credited Kathryn Barger, the Supervisor for Los Angeles County‘s 5th District, with being a decisive force. ‘She embraced this project. She said we have to do this in the Antelope Valley. She connected us with Palmdale, and here we are today,’ Esrailian told ABC.
Bale’s role throughout has been to keep the mission visible and the funding moving, but Esrailian’s involvement as co-founder reflects a structure in which the actor is one part of a larger operation rather than a solo philanthropist. That distinction matters for a project aiming at permanence: celebrity attention can open doors, but the ongoing work of running a residential care facility for vulnerable children requires institutional depth and professional leadership.
The organisation now faces the work of filling those 12 units with sibling groups and demonstrating, over time, that the village model can become a template others replicate. California’s foster system, the largest of its kind in the country, offers no shortage of need to meet.
