Annalise H. Fonza

Dr. Annalise Fonza joined the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at Cal Poly Pomona as a Lecturer in January 2022, but she has been crafting the art of teaching adults since the late 1990's. She self-identifies as a writer, a womanist, and as a former United Methodist clergywoman who is now unapologetically non-theist, also known as a-theist. This semester (SPR 2026), Dr. Fonza teaches URP 1051 -Ethnic Communities, Places, and Urban Planning, which is an Area F course cross-listed in the Department of Ethnic and Women’s Studies, and she teaches URP 4110 - Evolution of American Cities and the Planning Movement. 

Dr. Fonza began her academic career in urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana (UIUC). As a graduate teaching associate, she was actively engaged with the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP). Upon graduation from UIUC, she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Urban & Regional Planning (URP). Before heading to Massachusetts to pursue her doctorate in regional planning , she accepted a brief intern position with the City of Urbana, Illinois, in the Department of Grants Management to organize, conduct, and present local housing data and to draft the city's Analysis of Impediments to Housing (AI). Years later, the findings of her AI research (sent to HUD Headquarters in Washington, D.C.) contributed to the creation a new local housing ordinance for the city of Urbana, Illinois. From 2020 - 2025, she was employed as a sworn federal civilian employee with the United States government.

Prior to becoming an urban planning scholar, Annalise articulated her talents as the Reverend Fonza in the United Methodist Church for about a decade, beginning 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 amazing leadership of Pastors Rudy and Juanita Rasmus. This work - becoming a servant-leader - has always been an enduring aspect of her personal, organizational, and professional endeavors. Upon offering a voluntary withdrawal from law school to pursue local church ministry, despite her professors attempts (including the Dean) to talk her into remaining in law school, Annalise went down a new path to pursue ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church. From 1996 - 2003, the Reverend Annalise Fonza gave of herself and her talents becoming an ordained clergywoman. In all, she was appointed to pastor six separate congregations in three different states, beginning her journey toward organizational leadership. 

At Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Fonza has had the privilege of educating hundreds of students (more than 800 and counting at CPP alone since 2022) about the centrality of ethnicity and culture as each of these factors is inextricably imbedded in the practice and history of urban and regional planning in the U.S. In the classroom, she is known as a challenging yet warm instructor, and she conducts herself as a professional academic in the wisdom of the African proverb that says, "Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero."  

In 2019, Dr. Fonza self-published a short electronic/digital document, which is available on most digital platforms entitled Rebuilding Black Communities, With Love. 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. Exploring 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 is a reputable and long-standing online company that provides educational and continuing education opportunities and resources to those seeking professional certification from the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and more. 

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 returns periodically to Massachusetts to lecture on the significance of this collection. Her latest lecture, in 2024, featured "herstories" of black women lawmakers from Beacon Hill who served the Commonwealth during the early part of the twenty-first century. On that day, the office of Mayor Dominic Sarno declared March 28, 2024, Dr. Annalise Fonza Day in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Dr. Fonza is skillful at "pitching tent" with communities and people who have experienced "root shock" and been dislodged from their sense of place. She has been employed at every level of government: federal, state, local, and even regional. She is a natural leader, and her abilities to lead and provide instructional design and delivery are apparent when it is her turn to shine. Presently, she has dual certification by The (American) Humanist Society as a Senior Humanist Celebrant (no expiration date), and as a Humanist Chaplain (endorsed  July 2025). Presently, she is employed as a hospital chaplain in the Kansas City metropolitan area. 

Known as a trailblazer, 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 socio-spatial identities and ideas innovatively in higher education, which she asserts is a system troubled by white, patriarchal and Western ideas that endure to this day throughout the practice of planning as a professional endeavor.

Finally, if you know Dr. Fonza personally or professionally, then you know that she believes wholeheartedly that education is just one of many keys to personal, social, economic, and global liberation and she empowers her students to understand that quality, not quantity, is always better. At Cal Poly Pomona and wherever she is, Dr. Fonza is a dedicated and courageous educator committed to “tearing down walls and building bridges” (once the slogan of Saint John’s Community Church in Houston). She demonstrates that it is possible to balance theory and practice in planning. Indeed, in the words of the great Mary Church Terrell (one of the founders of the former National Association of Colored Women), Dr. Annalise Fonza is a walking, breathing personification of the phrase "onward and upward." 

Updated 01/29/2026