Santa Clara was a residential home for children that was open from 1987 to 2010 and built, over the course of those years, a particular way of working, as it broke with the legally established models. Its members called themselves the Santa Clara Family, and organized themselves as older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and a couple as parents. They quit their professional activities in order to meet the challenge of being at the forefront of a truly unique institution. We started this research seeking to explore the characteristics that differentiated Santa Clara from other institutions and to understand what the concept of family was for them as well as how they organized themselves. In order to achieve these goals, we take as a reference the point of view of Cícero and Eliete, the founders of the project. Through semi-structured interviews, we analyze the information provided by them to better understand their proposal. Thereby, some categories emerged: freedom, minorism, education, ability to dream and, of course, family. These categories have broadened our discussions about fostering and caring for children in institutions for a long time, and have also shown us how important it is to listen and give space for children and adolescents to be free and responsible. Given this, we briefly discuss the legal fostering models, problematizing the concept of family.