We built this because the system was broken.

I served in the U.S. Navy. After leaving the service, I started Wounded Warriors in 2021 because the same story kept playing out too many times to ignore. A veteran would ask for help finding a resource they'd been promised. I'd call the number they were given. It would ring into a fax tone, or a voicemail box that was full, or a receptionist who had never heard of the program. This wasn't unusual. It was the default.

Most veterans don't stop after the first dead end. They stop after the fifth. By the time a person in crisis has been handed five wrong numbers, they are done. They go home, they close the tab, they tell themselves the help they earned through their service isn't really meant for them. The statistics everyone quotes — 17 a day, 35,000 unhoused, 260,000 in the benefits backlog — those aren't abstract. They are the accumulated weight of a system that hands veterans the wrong phone number and calls that "a referral."

What we built

Wounded Warriors does two things. First: we run an open, machine-queryable directory of veteran resources — currently 144,829 listings across all 50 states and U.S. territories, ingested from public federal and state directories. Broken links are flagged, and anyone can report a wrong phone number or a closed program so we can review and correct the listing.

Second: when the directory is the wrong answer — when a veteran faces eviction tomorrow and the housing program has a three-month wait-list — we provide direct aid. Emergency funding. Healthcare sponsorships. Care packages for hospitalized veterans. Down payment assistance. HRT clinic access. Five programs — each program page shows whether it is taking applications right now — plus our free Veteran Resource Navigator that's always open. No application fee. No means test that pretends dignity is something you qualify for.

What we don't do

We don't run a crisis line. 988 exists, and it works. When a veteran needs immediate help, our job is to route them to 988 and stay out of the way. That is why the crisis banner on every page of this site is styled to be calm, not alarming, and has never been dismissible. A veteran in crisis should not have to read my story to get to the phone.

We don't send direct mail fundraising appeals. We don't buy email lists. We don't do exit-intent popovers or guilt copy. If you give to Wounded Warriors, you give because you read what we do and decided it was worth supporting. You will not be contacted eight more times this quarter.

We don't claim to speak for every veteran or know every answer. Our directory is limited by what we can verify. Our programs are limited by our capacity. When we don't know something, the answer on the site is we don't know — not a confident placeholder. Veterans have been lied to enough.

How you can see what we do

Everything a donor or a journalist or a skeptical program officer would want to verify is public. Our IRS Form 990 is filed every year and available on ProPublica, including compensation disclosures. Our Candid Platinum Seal of Transparency is earned by completing Candid's full disclosure program. Our Charity Navigator profile is public. The names, salaries, and governance data on our leadership page come directly from the 990, not from marketing.

If you find something on this site you cannot verify from a primary source, email me directly. I will either point you to the source or fix the claim.

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.