The most important climate data is often the data you don't have. It's the heat island on a block with no weather station, the particulate plume in a neighborhood downwind from a highway, the cultural landmark quietly succumbing to flood risk. GROUND3D, a nonprofit founded this year, is betting that the people who live there should own the tools to measure it.
Founded by Zoe Voss Lee and Wil Jones, the organization describes itself as a community planning practice. Its wedge is straightforward: co-design and deploy low-cost sensor networks and mobile data collection tools with neighborhoods, then help them use the resulting 3D street-level data to advocate for themselves [GROUND3D, 2025]. The initial focus is on New York City, tackling air quality, extreme heat, and heritage preservation [GROUND3D, 2025].
The Co-Design Wedge
The bet here isn't on novel hardware. Plenty of companies sell environmental sensors. The bet is on a different ownership and governance model. GROUND3D's stated services,product development, strategic planning, workshop facilitation,are all in service of building what it calls "community-owned spatial data infrastructure" [MIT Orbit, 2025]. The theory is that data collected and controlled locally is more likely to be trusted and acted upon. It's a response to the perennial gap between municipal sensor networks and the granular, hyperlocal environmental justice concerns of underserved communities.
Founders Lee and Jones bring backgrounds in urbanism and civic engagement, with Jones having prior roles at FloodLine, the MIT Trust Center, and the City of Boston [RocketReach, 2025]. The venture is structured as a nonprofit. They emerged from MIT's Delta V accelerator this year [Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, 2025].
An Unproven, Early-Stage Model
The ambition is clear, but the path is unmapped. This is a very young organization with no disclosed funding, customers, or deployed projects cited in public sources. The model faces familiar hurdles:
- The procurement puzzle. City agencies and large nonprofits are slow, budget-constrained buyers.
- The maintenance question. Keeping a sensor network calibrated and powered through community leadership changes is a significant burden.
- The impact measurement. Proving a direct causal line from a community data project to a tangible resilience outcome is difficult.
The nonprofit's answer will likely hinge on proving that its co-design process delivers more actionable, politically potent data than a top-down alternative. GROUND3D is betting that the cheapest way to get a speed bump, a tree canopy, or a cooling center is to first get the data that proves you need one.