They made it a family affair Jim Perry will tell you that it all started because his wife Dona really likes babies. That's why the middle-aged couple agreed to take in a baby boy who'd been abandoned by his parents because he had Down syndrome. That was 20 years ago, when their two daughters had gone off to college and their son was a teenager. Dona signed them up as a foster family, willing to care for infants with special medical or emotional needs. "She thought she could take care of the babies and when they got bigger, she'd pass them on to someone else," Jim said. That first baby, who'd been left at the hospital by his parents, "was so easy," Dona recalled, "I figured this was a breeze." Four weeks later, they got a second baby - a 3-month-old girl born addicted to drugs, who weighed less than 5 pounds and cried constantly. Not so breezy. For months, Jim and Dona had to sleep in shifts, tending two needy infants. A year later, they took in a 4-year-old boy who was deaf and had been living in a car with his itinerant father. "He'd never had a bedtime," Dona said, "or sat at a table for a meal." Then came a 2-day-old girl who'd been born in jail to a mother addicted to alcohol. And a 1-year-old boy with a fractured skull; he had been thrown down a flight of stairs. And the older sister of the constant crier, who had passed through three foster homes in four years. She came for a weekend visit, Dona said. Her foster mother dropped her off with two bags of clothes and told me, 'If you don't want her, call the social worker.' "We had to keep her," Dona said. In fact, they kept all six of the children they had been assigned to foster. "We're not the kind of people who can't say 'no,'" Jim Perry insists, as if he knows just what I'm thinking. We have said no. We closed our doors after No. Every one of those six babies Dona imagined they might hand off has grown into a responsible, hard-working, fun-loving young adult. The youngest is about to graduate from high school; the oldest is finishing college. Their story is the kind that makes me marvel at the goodness of ordinary people. They shared it with me last week in their sprawling Camarillo home, where the dining room table seats 20 people. And they shared it with more than 1,000 people in Beverly Hills on Thursday night, at the 20th anniversary dinner of the Alliance for Children's Rights. The advocacy and legal center protects the rights of poor and neglected children, in court and on the ground. You can judge its impact by the numbers: 100,000 children assisted, hundreds of adoptions arranged, more than 35,000 pro bono hours donated by lawyers from the city's top firms. On Thursday night, it was the personal stories that had donors reaching for their wallets - a girl with no family ushered through college, twin brothers kept together through adoption, foster families assisted with basics such as wheelchairs, tutoring and diapers.