There are life’s little epiphanies and then there are the kind that Mary Fanaro has; upending, core-shaking, world-changing, when everything shifts and the journey becomes about paying attention to possibility.

Mary Fanaro is a social entrepreneur and Founder of OmniPeace Foundation. She came up with the name OmniPeace while watching a documentary called God Sleeps in Rwanda. She kept hearing the words omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient; hence, the birth of OmniPeace – All. Things. Peace. Little did she know, it would end up being her own self-fulfilling prophecy.

OmniPeace Foundation was launched in 2007 as a humanitarian fashion brand. It was one of the first brands in retail that had a mission attached: to build schools and empower youth living in extreme poverty in Africa. The schools were built inside Dr. Jeffrey Sachs’ (economist and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University) Millennium Villages Project - a bold, innovative model helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty by 2025. Seven schools later (in Senegal, Mali and Malawi), and a multimillion-dollar fashion brand, she knew there was more.

She worked harder and stayed even more attuned to anything and everything that resonated with her. She tracked every lead and embraced all ideas that stirred her passion. And if what they say is true and passion is God’s will for us, she was well on her way to finding it; even if that meant taking meetings with an IV drip in her arm after the latest round of chemotherapy.

Just two weeks before the launch of OmniPeace on June 12, 2007, Fanaro went in for her annual exam and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Fanaro says, “I think there’s something that happens when you’re faced with a life-threatening disease that propels us into a fight or flight mode. Then denial seems like the next safest place to go because you can’t even grasp what’s happening to you. Embracing it comes later when the next round of chemo is par for the course, and you have no choice but to have faith.”

With friends and family by her side and a defiant spirit that had her swimming, hitting the gym and traveling when she wasn’t supposed to, she stared down the disease and nine rounds of aggressive chemo, that has left her cancer free for 12 years. “I had no choice but to suit up and show up because OmniPeace had taken off,” Fanaro says. “Listen, I’m not a superhero but I had a will to live like nobody’s business and a company to run that was helping people who couldn’t afford to save their own lives. So, I decided to stay in the ring and fight for the people who couldn’t fight for themselves.”

“Control is a facade,” Fanaro says. “And the greatest form of control is surrender. It took me half a lifetime to get that and I still have trouble.” As she looks at a poster in her office of over 50 celebrities wearing OmniPeace, with a tagline – Can Fashion Save Lives, she now has proof that it does…she just didn’t know it would end up being her own.

But after all was said and done, she was still restless and searching for more. “I had been on safari in Africa in my 20’s, and at the end of our safari, our guide took us to a refugee camp,” Fanaro says. “It haunted me. I had never seen poverty like that before in my life. The experience was life-changing, and it never left my heart. And for some strange reason, I knew I would be back. Something about Africa had moved me and there was a transformation that I couldn’t explain. Little did I know twenty-five years later, I would end up back in a refugee camp, in Rwanda, building the first music school in a camp.”

After a gorilla trek in Rwanda, she was asked by her cab driver, who had also become her friend, to build a music school in Rwanda. There were none in Kigali and he wanted his son to learn how to play. She politely declined as she had no musical talent whatsoever. But much like the beginning of this story, God had a plan and all she needed to do was step out of the way, one more time. A few weeks after returning home, she was at a luncheon and just so happened to be sitting next to a woman who was from Rwanda. In all her time in Los Angeles, that had never happened before. The woman had a friend in Rwanda who also happened to be on his way to becoming the Chair of Composition at Berklee College of Music… and that was all she needed to launch the school. His name was Richard Carrick. Richard hired the teachers, invited the kids from the Gisimba Orphanage and Meg Foundation, and the first Rwanda Rocks Music School was born.

Three months later on her way to the airport she stopped at a coffee shop. The boy behind the counter recognized her Rwanda Rocks T-shirt, as the word had gotten around about the school. He told her his father ran a program in a refugee camp called Kiziba. It was home to 18,000 refugees, some of them the most vulnerable children in the world. The father had a space that needed a purpose, and the second Rwanda Rocks Music School was launched.

Now the story would usually end here, but it doesn’t. There is more to come, more schools to build and more music to make. So stay tuned, because the journey of a thousand miles has only just begun!