In college, Morgan DeNicola promoted nightclubs in New York City. Today she runs the DeNicola Family Foundation and serves as vice chair of the Humpty Dumpty Institute, an NGO that brings members of Congress into closed-door sessions inside foreign embassies. She says a two-year-old named Comfort is responsible for all of it.
“I think phenomenal is anybody who has a willingness to continue to grow and gets excited about it, gets excited about change,” she told host Amy Boyle on Season 6 of the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast.
Ask Morgan what a given week looks like and it might include grants in Italy, a string of conference calls, and packing for a trip that could take her “pretty much anywhere around the world.” The week before we recorded, it also included the Tony Awards. Through a chance introduction to a photographer in Brooklyn, she ended up as one of the co-producers on the CATS: The Jellicle Ball. A revival of Cats, built around the LGBTQ+ ballroom community, which picked up nine nominations and won three. “I cry, I laugh, I love seeing everybody else that gets emotionally involved with it,” she said. “If you’re not feeling what you’re doing, you’re missing a part of the world.” By the end of the night, she said, “I have some glitter in my eyes.”
None of it was the plan. Morgan was working in marketing when her father handed her a plane ticket to Africa and told her to go, observe, and take notes. “I had no idea” what she was walking into, she said. The trip took her to an orphanage run by Buddhist monks, where children, many of whom had lost parents to AIDS, were also being taught languages, computer science, and martial arts so they could return to their villages “stronger.” Watching local and foreign officials work together to look after the children, she said, gave her “a taste of that dance and how governments work together.” She flew home and told her parents, “I can no longer be in marketing. There’s so much more that I need to be doing.”
Her parents had already begun forming an answer to that: a family foundation, with Morgan running it. She remembers the conversation that made it official. “We need to talk,” they said. “I thought I was in trouble,” she recalled, still bracing for “what did I do?” Her father’s response to her hesitation was simple: “So you better start learning.”
What she has learned since includes how to hold two very different worlds at once. She now runs congressional delegations that spend their days behind closed doors in foreign embassies, and the surprise, she says, isn’t the tension. “They can be friends, they can be colleagues,” she said of lawmakers from opposing parties, once the meetings end. “Talking about kids, dogs, summer plans... I would say 99% of the time it’s respectful conversations.” Through the same foundation and institute, she’s also helping build a mental health program for first responders, “shining a spotlight on the struggles that a lot of people that are in service of others go through every single day,” work she connects directly to her own experience with anxiety, panic attacks, and borderline personality disorder. “It wasn’t until I started my journey in philanthropy that I realized they weren’t obstacles,” she said. “They were oddly gifts.”
On the harder days, she leans on a ritual her wife taught her: the buts, naming three good things, however small. “But it’s raining. I love the rain,” she offered as an example. “She brings me back to Earth,” Morgan said, “and reminds me to be grateful for whatever those three things, the three buts, are in that day.”
It all traces back, she said, to a little girl at that orphanage in Africa. Her name was Comfort. She was two years old, and caretakers told Morgan she hadn’t smiled since she’d arrived. Morgan picked her up anyway. The girl stared at her hair; Morgan let it down and brushed it against her cheek, and “a giant smile went across her face.” “Two people who are not even talking to each other are having such an intense moment,” she said. “She changed my life and I changed her experience in one moment without words.” Ten years later, she says, “that girl changed my life without saying anything.”
Asked what she’d tell her younger self, Morgan didn’t hesitate: “Fear is good. Don’t get too comfortable.” She was afraid of nearly everything once, she said: public speaking, travel, even flying, which she now does constantly. “The moment I started to find ways of overcoming those fears were the moments that I started to find success and strength.”
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