St. Margaret of
Castello's House

The Castello Companions

When Margaret of Castello was abandoned by her noble family, it was the poor of the city who took her in — the people with the least, giving the most, to a disabled girl the world had discarded. Our whole foundation stands on that story. The Castello Companions program re-enacts it, gently, every week.

The Companions program pairs children of the Most Invisible Initiative with children of our neurodivergent community in structured, supervised friendships — because the deepest thing either child needs is the same thing: to matter to someone their own size.

  • Friendship, Never Caregiving

    One rule stands above the program: a Companion is a friend, never a caregiver. No child is ever given responsibility for another child’s safety, medication, or regulation — that work belongs to paid, trained adults, always. Many of our children were forced to be small adults far too young; this program returns childhood, it never re-assigns the burden.

  • Matched by Delight, Not by Need

    Pairs are matched by staff around shared loves — Legos, the garden, the dogs at St. Bernadette’s, drawing, trains — because friendship grows from what we both like, never from what you lack.

  • Reciprocity by Design

    Neither child is the helped one. Activities are chosen so each child sometimes leads — the child who knows every dinosaur teaches; the child who bakes shares; and both discover the same truth from opposite sides: I am worth befriending.

How the Castello Companions Program Works

The shape of it

  • Staff-Matched Pairs Thoughtful matching by shared interest and temperament, reviewed each season, with either child free to re-match without fault or explanation.
  • Structured, Supervised Time Weekly shared activities inside ordinary campus life — a guild shift side by side, game afternoons, walking the paths, sitting together at Mass — always within adult sight and safeguarding norms.
  • Service Side by Side Companions pairs join the campus’s “reverse volunteering” projects together — packing care boxes, tending the giving garden — so both children get to be the helpers, never just the helped.
  • The Fruit We’re After Belonging, being known, being missed when absent — the quiet medicine of mattering, administered in the only dosage that works: a friend.

The Christ’s Most Invisible Initiative

All twelve programmes