Annalise H. Fonza

Since January 2022, Dr. Annalise Fonza has been a Lecturer in the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at Cal Poly Pomona, but she has been crafting the art of teaching adults from the late 1990's. As a seminarian (Saint Paul School of Theology), she was employed as a graduate assistant for the Rev. Dr. Tex Sample and the Rev. Dr. Emilie M. Townes, who is a prolific author and recently the Dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Dr. Townes' leadership and scholarship brought Annalise - front and center - to womanism as an academic endeavor. 

Dr. Fonza grew up with a front row seat to watching her two amazing parents be committed to public service and raise four children: Dr. Marjorie Fonza-Thomason, who is a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy, and her father, Mr. Leslie Fonza, who is an Air Force veteran, were her first teachers in life. Every day, Dr. Annalise Fonza is proud to be their adult daughter; and indeed, the apple does not fall far from the tree! 

Dr. Annalise Fonza has courageously chartered her own path. She self-identifies as a writer, a womanist, and as a former United Methodist clergywoman who is now unapologetically atheist. Outside of Cal Poly Pomona, she is a sworn federal civilian employee. She has an inate, itinerant, and agile orientation to life. This Spring semester (2025) at Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Fonza teaches URP 1051 - Ethnic Communities, Places, and Urban Planning, which is an Area F course cross-listed in the Cal Poly Pomona Department of Ethnic and Women’s Studies. In California, high school students and college students at the post-secondary level are required to take one course in ethnic studies at public institutions to complete their course requirements. 

Dr. Fonza began her professional academic career in urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana (UIUC). At UIUC, she was actively engaged with the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP). Concurrently, she became like a shadow to John Lee Johnson, a local housing advocate who is now deceased, and she participated in the development of the North First Street in Champaign, Illinois. It was in Champaign that she also was hired to teach religion and developmental writing courses, part-time, at what is now Parkland College. Upon graduation from UIUC, the then Rev. Annalise Fonza, was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Urban & Regional Planning (URP) and she accepted a brief intern position with the City of Urbana, Illinois, in the Department of Grants Management and her task was to organize, conduct, and present local housing research and to draft the city's Analysis of Impediments to Housing (AI).

At the time of her graduation, Annalise deposited her 2002 master's thesis, an oral history of the redevelopment of North First Street, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign library. When her work was done at the City of Urbana, Annalise accepted a graduate fellowship to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and she graduated with a 4.0 cumulative gpa with a Ph.D. in Regional Planning. Years later and hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts, she was thrilled to learn that the findings of her AI research (sent to HUD Headquarters in Washington, D.C.) led to the future drafting of a new housing ordinance for the city of Urbana, Illinois. 

As a lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Fonza has had the privilege of educating hundreds of students about the centrality of ethnicity and culture as they are related to the practice and history of urban and regional planning in the U.S. This semester, Dr. Fonza returns to teach URP 4110 - Evolution of American Cities and the Planning Movement, which is an upper level course for urban planning majors, and it is offered as an elective course for students in other departments. In the classroom, Dr. Fonza is known as a challenging yet warm instructor, and she conducts herself as a professional academic in the wisdom of the Chinese proverb that says, "The teacher can open the door, but the student must walk through it." 

In 2019, Dr. Fonza published a short electronic/digital document, which is available on most digital platforms entitled Rebuilding Black Communities, With Love. She refers to it as a love letter to Black America. Writing as a womanist planning scholar in this bold yet brief publication, Dr. Fonza pays tribute to Kansas City entrepreneur and Missouri Restaurant Hall of Famer, Mr. Ollie Gates. The interconnectedness of history, culture, and placemaking is central to Dr. Fonza's scholarly work. In 2022, she also published two online courses on behalf of Planetizen, Inc., which provide continuing education opportunities and resources to those seeking professional certification from the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). 

Dr. Fonza's Planetizen courses explore the centrality of culture and ethnicity in urban planning and development and she concludes that urban and regional planners at every level of government and civic engagement - as well as real estate professionals - must now become cognizant that many places in the U.S. have been and will continue to be shaped and reshaped by waves of ethnic and cultural communities or enclaves, including those that are (or were) predominantly black and African American, such as Harlem in New York City. Dr. Fonza asserts that this socio-spatial phenomenon will only become more significant for urban and regional planners in the twenty-first century.

Conducting oral histories and thus preserving the cultural and collective histories of black people and black communities are dominant features of Dr. Fonza’s research, teaching, and professional profile. In 2007, she established her own digital collection of oral histories of black residents in Springfield, Massachusetts, and short audio/oral histories of black and brown lawmakers and staff from Beacon Hill, which is archived at the Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History in Massachusetts. She has returned periodically to present lectures on this collection. On March 28, 2024, Dr. Fonza presented a lecture at the Museum in honor of black women lawmakers from Beacon Hill who served the Commonwealth during the early part of the twenty-first century. At this event, a representative from Mayor Dominic Sarno's office presented Dr. Fonza with a proclamation declaring Thursday, March 28, 2024, Dr. Annalise Fonza Day in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Wherever she is, Dr. Fonza is committed to and active in public service. Her professional tenure in urban and government administration began in 1990, when she earned her Bachelors of Arts degree in Political Science, at what is now the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. During the historic same sex marriage decision of 2003, she served the 11th Hampden District of Springfield as a legislative aide for former Massachusetts State Representative, Mr. Benjamin Swan. For a brief time, Annalise served as chief legislative assistant for a member of the Atlanta, Georgia City Council. In this capacity, she was assigned as a liaison for the proposed redevelopment of Fort McPherson, which is now owned by producer/director/actor Tyler Perry. As a student at Clark Atlanta University (CAU), a historically black college/university or HBCU, Annalise was elected in 1989 from the student body as the first Miss CAU. Two decades later, she returned as a faculty member in the Public Administration Department for one academic year. She was also initiated into Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Sigma Chapter (CAU), in the fall of 1987.

In addition, Annalise used her talents as the Reverend Fonza in the United Methodist Church for about a decade beginning in the late 1990's, in the city of Houston, Texas, and while she was a first-year student at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law. Her service to vulnerable populations, including veterans and those affected by domestic violence began formally at Saint John’s Community Church in Houston, Texas, under the leadership of Pastors Rudy and Juanita Rasmus. This work - serving people - has been an enduring feature of her personal, organizational, and professional endeavors. As an ordained pastor, she served under episcopal appointment to six separate congregations in three different states: Missouri, Illinois, and Massachusetts.

Dr. Fonza is particularly skillful at "pitching tent" with communities and people who have experienced "root shock" and been dislodged from their sense of place. She is a natural leader, and this is most evident whenever she lectures a class or leads a program or project. Presently, she is certified by the American Humanist Society as a Senior Humanist Celebrant (no expiration date), and she is duly authorized to co-create ceremonies and to officiate services with those who bravely self-identify as atheists, humanists, secularists, freethinkers, black “nones,” and for others who choose to mark the special occasions in their lives with no reference or mention of a belief in supernatural beings, myths, or philosophies.

Last but not least, Dr. Fonza is the first black woman scholar in urban planning in the United States to write and publish in a peer-reviewed journal about the significance of womanist thought as a theoretical/methodological approach to urban planning and regional development. She articulates womanist thought as a means of affirming and empowering a growing number of planning students, academicians, and practitioners who wish to embrace their unique identities and ideas innovatively in the academy, which she asserts is a system that continues to hold them back or exclude those who are marginalized and  "othered" through various frameworks and microaggressions, even in the tenure process. If you know Dr. Fonza personally or professionally, then you know that she believes wholeheartedly that education is one of many keys to personal, social, and global liberation. Indeed, she is the consummate educator. In closing, her commitment to learning and to “tearing down walls and building bridges” – once the slogan of Saint John’s Community Church in Houston  -  is still as strong today as it was three decades ago.