A builder who still frames.

Leonard F. “Len” Gengel was born October 27, 1960, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the youngest of eight children. He grew up on Grafton Hill, the son of Bernard and Winifred Gengel.

He earned business degrees from Becker College and Central Connecticut State University — at Becker he was catcher, first baseman, and baseball captain — and started C&S Builders in Rutland while he was still a student. Over thirty years he built ten neighborhoods and more than 350 homes in Central Massachusetts. In 1995 the state named him Homebuilder of the Year.

He became the youngest president of the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts, and also served as past president of Greater Worcester Habitat for Humanity. In that office he did two things the industry still copies: he formed the first partnership between HBAMA and Habitat for Humanity, and he invented the weekend blitz build — a finished house, raised by member builders, in days. He was part of the National Association of Home Builders’ Builder 20 club network.

On January 12, 2010, his daughter Britney, 19, was killed in the Haiti earthquake. Hours earlier she had texted her mother that she wanted to move there and start an orphanage. Len and Cherylann, with their sons Bernie and Richie, made that text the work of the rest of their lives.

They founded Be Like Brit. Len retired from production building and made 39 trips to Haiti over two years to supervise Brit’s Home. He set up a block factory on site, compression-tested the concrete after every trip, and trained more than 100 Haitian workers — in a country with no official building code — to seismic standards matching San Francisco. Brit’s Home opened in 2013: 19,000 square feet for her 19 years, shaped like the letter B, designed for 33 girls and 33 boys — one for each day she was missing. Engineering News-Record named it a Global Best Project that year. The building held through Haiti’s 2021 earthquake.

Today the foundation houses 86 children, employs more than 100 Haitian staff, has built 159 homes for local families, and runs Brit’s Academy, Brit’s Clinic, and a U.S. transition program. Len and Cherylann co-authored Heartache and Hope in Haiti: The Britney Gengel Story.

Becker College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School gave him honorary doctorates in 2014. The New England Patriots honored Len and Cherylann in 2017. In 2023 the Paulist Center in Boston presented them the Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice.

He has lived in Rutland and Holden, Massachusetts; Sunset, South Carolina; Boynton Beach, Florida; and now Polson, Montana. He remains co-founder and president of Be Like Brit. The Worcester office closed in 2026. The work in Haiti did not.