Man Turns Pre-Wedding Breakup Into Positive to Help Others

What do you do if your wedding engagement simply falls apart? If you ask this Pittsburgh groom, the answer isn't crying, wallowing or melting down. In fact, he's about to celebrate -- and he says that everyone is welcome to join.

Phil Laboon was supposed to be getting married on August 30th. He explains, "things just didn't work out for one reason or another so I ended up calling off the wedding pretty much the last minute."

He had already booked the reception and paid for all the food and booze, so Phil decided to squeeze the sour taste of his breakup into something sweet.

"We were kind of talking about it, me and my friends, and talking about almost like farm-aid, like LemonAid. This could help these kids and turning the lemons I got into lemonade."

Those kids he's talking about were born in third world counties- children with devastating medical problems. So Phil turned his wedding reception into a fundraiser for Surgicorps.

Phil explains, "it snowballed into this massive event, where we are getting thousands of dollars in donations, we're selling hundreds of tickets."

Once word got out, his phone started ringing, and soon gift baskets with everything from $50 to $12,000 donations came in.

When he saw how much money he was racking up, Phil realized that his painful split was now a labor of love.

"It makes us feel really good that we're going to literally be changing hundreds of children's lives. It makes me feel like it's not the not the worst thing in the world to cancel a wedding."

This one breakup may in fact make up to $50,000 for children in need.

"I'm really excited to see what the end result of all this is, which is the smiles on all the kids faces," Phil said.

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