Founder Profile

Dillon Parkes

Founder & Executive Director, Wounded Warriors

Based in The Woodlands, Texas · Founded Wounded Warriors in 2021 (IRS ruling year) · national 501(c)(3), EIN 86-1336741

Role: Founder & Executive Director, Wounded Warriors
Based: The Woodlands, TX (Houston metro)
Founded: 2021 — IRS 501(c)(3) ruling year
Background: Full-stack engineer + veteran advocate
Specialty: Building public-benefit technology infrastructure for the U.S. veteran-aid sector
Contact: partnerships@warriorsfund.org (partnerships) · info@warriorsfund.org (press)

Mission

Connect U.S. military veterans to veteran resources across all 50 states + territories — and provide direct aid when the federal safety net leaves a gap. No dead ends. No disconnected numbers. No veteran left behind.

What Wounded Warriors operates

Under Dillon's leadership, Wounded Warriors operates an open, machine-queryable veteran-resource directory — 144,900+ records across 50 states + DC + 5 territories, FIPS-tract geocoded (75% of records), joined with federal Census ACS, CDC PLACES, and HUD CHAS data.

The infrastructure includes a 43-tool Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the U.S. veteran-aid space. AI assistants (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity, any MCP-compatible agent) can query the directory directly when helping a veteran, surfacing directory information in milliseconds rather than scraping unrelated webpages.

Five direct-aid programs operate alongside the directory: Emergency Financial Aid (applications currently paused), HRT Sponsorships (transgender veteran healthcare), Care Packages for Hospitalized Veterans, Housing Down-Payment Assistance, and Corporate Partnerships.

Why this work

The driving observation: 17.6 veterans die by suicide every day. ~32,800 veterans sleep unhoused on any given night. ~260,000 veterans wait on backlogged VA disability decisions. Most federal safety-net programs run on quarterly or annual cycles. Eviction notices run on weeks. Suicide risk peaks in the first 90 days post-psychiatric-discharge — exactly when federal follow-up is at its weakest. The gap between "programs that exist" and "programs that arrive in time" is where lives are lost. Wounded Warriors is the integration layer between the existing infrastructure and the veteran who needs it now.

Recognition + verification

Wounded Warriors holds Candid's 2026 Platinum Seal of Transparency — the highest tier offered by Candid (formerly GuideStar). Approximately 10% of U.S. 501(c)(3)s have any Candid seal; far fewer reach Platinum. The seal is public verifiable evidence of financial transparency, governance disclosure, and impact reporting standards.

Every Form 990 public on ProPublica. Candid Platinum Seal of Transparency (2026). Rated on Charity Navigator. Independent verifier sameAs links embedded in our NGO Schema.org block on every page (IRS Pub 78, Candid, GuideStar, Charity Navigator, ProPublica, Benevity, Givebutter, Pledge.to, The Giving Block, GreatNonprofits, plus social profiles).

Press + research

Available for media interviews on veteran-aid policy, AI agent infrastructure for nonprofits, donor-routing in the veteran-charity sector, and national 501(c)(3) operations. Published research briefs available at /research covering post-discharge psychiatric mortality, the VA-loan closing-cost wall, and tract-level service-desert detection.

Verify everything on this page

Independent verification links → Candid Platinum profile → ProPublica Form 990s → IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search (search EIN 86-1336741) → Published research briefs → Press kit →

For partnerships + funding

Email partnerships team → 5 institutional-funding programs → Pull a proposal pack → Charity data (DAF / portal review) →

Other work

Beyond Wounded Warriors, Dillon founded MORVS, a private intelligence infrastructure company publishing source-linked public data for AI agents, and Voidly, a privacy-infrastructure company. He co-founded Nexcom, a network of local and specialist publications. Full profile: Dillon Parkes at MORVS.