Hale House

"If you can't hold the children in your arms, hold them in your heart." |

WOMAN HERO:

CLARA HALE

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HALE HOUSE

Nichelle Philip

Axia College

Instructor: Benjamin Forest/ Mgmt 245

Clara McBride Hale was born in Elizabeth City, NJ in 1905 but grew up in Philadelphia, PA. She became an orphan at 16 and a widow at the age of 27 after her husband Thomas Hale died of cancer. Desperate to find the resources to take care of her children, she got a job as a babysitter for children with mothers too busy to take care of their own children. Mrs. Hale focus on her children forced her to use the motivation concept. She soon learned that she could become a licensed foster mother. During the next 25 years, she was a foster mother to over 40 children, all with unique and religious backgrounds.

Her goal was to take in all of these children which no one wanted, and she accomplished that goal very well. As more and more problems of drug abuse broke through in her little community in Harlem, more and more people would come to her door holding a child with AIDS, usually because her mother took drugs and couldn't or wouldn't care for the child. She would never say no to a child that no one wanted just because they had problems. Within six months, she had 22 babies (all with AIDS) in a five-room apartment. Soon she had more and more children in that apartment, and it was packed, but she never said no to a child who no one wanted. Clara Hale's children, Lorraine, Nathan and Kenneth (who was adopted) didn't even know that all these children weren't their real siblings, until they were in their preteens.

In 1973 as Clara was thinking about retiring from fostering children in her home, her daughter Lorraine saw a drunken mother with a child and told the mother to go to Clara for help. Clara never took a baby off the streets before, but she didn’t want to say no to a needy mother and child. It inspired her to keep taking care of children. In 1985,...