When children are taken from home, siblings are usually split across separate placements. In Palmdale, a cluster of houses was built so they no longer have to be.
My little children, let's not love in word only, neither with the tongue only, but in deed and truth.
1 John 3:18
When a family comes apart and the children are removed, the siblings are often the next to go. Few foster homes can take three or four children at once, so brothers and sisters get scattered across the county, losing each other at the moment they have already lost everything else.
Together California was built against that pattern. It opened on September 11, 2026, in Palmdale, in the county with the largest foster population in the country: twelve furnished homes, plus two apartments for teenagers aging out so they are not turned loose alone. A sibling group can move in and stay whole.
The striking thing is how long it took, and how many hands. The partnership formed in 2022, ground was broken in 2024, and close to nine million dollars came in through thousands of gifts, large and small. Christian Bale, no stranger to a disrupted childhood himself, gave years to it. Years is the operative word.
The letter of First John has a name for this. It insists that love lives in deed and truth, that love is a thing you make with your hands. The line just before it, verse 17, presses harder: it asks how God's love can remain in someone who sees a brother in need and closes his heart against him.
A closed heart is quiet and cheap. It asks nothing. An open one, on this scale, takes architects and donors and permits and four years, and a decision made early that no child would be split from a brother to make the logistics simpler. Bale put the aim plainly: "It's our job to turn their heartbreak and their pain into love and hope and a sense of future."
That kind of love does not announce itself. It gets poured and framed and wired and furnished. Then a child walks in, and the brother is already there.