The awareness to help others from privilege has always been very present in Christian Bale. The actor of Welsh origin, 50, experienced it in his house, hand in hand with his father, David Bale, who “protested and shouted at Margaret Thatcher.” “As a child I didn't really understand what he did, but I loved it, and I admired how he went out of his way for others,” he remembers now, when he himself has decided to take a step forward and, beyond donating money to causes here and there, get directly involved with one. In this case, creating a community for foster children in which siblings can stay together when they don't have their parents. A kind of town in a town in California in which he will invest 22 million dollars (just over 20 million euros).
The Oscar winner for best supporting actor for The Fighter inaugurated the works on the complex on Wednesday, February 7, work that will not be completed until 2025. This small town will be located in Palmdale, a quiet city of about 150,000 inhabitants about 100 kilometers north of Los Angeles, in the valley area. Antelope, and will be California's first of its kind. Located next to a park and near a shopping and cafe area, it will occupy an area of about 700 square meters where there will be 12 houses where the minors will live and two apartments that will serve for temporary transitions for the minors.
Bale has shaped the project as part of an organization called Together California, which he created together with Tim McCormick, who was executive director of Children's Villages in the United States for almost two decades and until a couple of months ago, when he has left her to join Bale; and with the professor of Medicine at the University of California Eric Esrailian, a philanthropist of Armenian origins and well known to celebrities – a few months ago he signed an open letter with Kim Kardashian to ask Joe Biden to seek a resolution to the blockade of the region from Nagorno Karabakh. “With our Together California model, [la aldea] It is something completely new, totally transformative and necessary. Imagine the absolute pain and trauma of losing your parents or being separated from them, and on top of that losing your brothers and sisters. “That is no way to treat children,” Bale declared to the media specialized in cinema. The Hollywood Reporter during the inauguration. “And, therefore, we are going to be the epicenter for all this. I hope this town It will be the first of many, and I hope that people, Californians and Angelenos, know how to join us to open their eyes to what is happening right under our noses. They are our children, and we must help them,” he stated.
In addition to Sibi Blažić — Bale's stuntman and wife for a quarter of a century, with whom he has two children, Luka and Joseph — various political and child welfare officials from both California and the United States were present at Wednesday's inauguration. Los Angeles and Palmdale. Among them Kathryn Barger, the recently re-elected Los Angeles County supervisor (a kind of supra-mayor who is above the mayors of each locality; Los Angeles County has five, all women), to whom Bale pointed out the so much for having been “the absolute dynamite” for Palmdale to keep this village. Barger herself explained that Bale had been very scrupulous and had set many conditions so that the location of the project was appropriate, personally visiting the city. “You can't just choose a place,” he argued. “You have to shop around, see what you think. Is it far from school? It is practical? Where are the shops? I did it all. I obsess and get deeply into the details. I'm blinded by all that. “I wanted to walk the streets and discover it.” “Who does that nowadays? “Who takes the time to understand things?” Barger reflected. “This is going to be one of the most important projects we work on in Los Angeles County as a place of youth transformation.”
At the start-up, between shovels and tractors, Dr. Esrailian confessed that there were “friends from Hollywood” who told him that the project was “too much money for only 70 children.” “But that's 70 or 80 kids forever, and if at least one of them ends up having an incredible life and potentially contributing to society, and if this village makes that possible for them, it's a bargain to me.” Among the investors are some “generous donors”, including part of the Bale family, but also his agent, Patrick Whitesell (ex-husband of Lauren Sanchez, now Jeff Bezos' fiancee) and other stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio. “Before I started doing this, I wrote checks for different charities around the world, and they are wonderful, and I will continue to do that. But I want to get more involved. I want my children to participate more. We are going to be able to touch the houses, the buildings and really see the difference we can make in the lives of children. That is priceless,” explained Bale, who intends for this to be just the first of his constructions and to create more for the State and the country.
According to Bale, the light bulb went on for him when he had his first daughter, Luka, in 2005, and he realized how helpless a baby and then a child is when their parents are no longer around. “At the same time, he investigated at night what things were happening in Los Angeles and where we could help. I was amazed and surprised to learn that we had more foster children than the entire country. And I got angry that I didn't know it before, and I thought, 'Here it is. Let's focus on that.' “My wife and I decided to do everything in our power to change it.” But it was his father, an environmental activist who died in 2003, at the age of 62—and for the last three years of his life he was married to the iconic feminist thinker Gloria Steinem—who instilled the seed in him. “We always had people coming and going and living in our house, people who didn't have a home…,” she remembers. “That's what he was like.” And that's what his son is like.
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