Editor's note: This is a submitted article from Wounded Warriors, a veterans charity headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, published ahead of Veterans Day. Its directory lists about 4,200 resources in Michigan.
Ask any veteran about the phone.
They are handed a number for a program that is supposed to help with a VA claim, a housing deposit, or a counselor who understands deployments. They call it. It rings to a fax tone. Or the voicemail is full. Or someone answers who has never heard of the program. After the third try, most people stop calling. The benefit they earned goes unused, and nobody writes that down as a problem.
Wounded Warriors, a national 501(c)(3) veterans charity headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, was founded in 2021 to close that gap with ordinary, relentless work: find every place a veteran can actually get help, confirm it still exists, and keep the list current.
The result is a free directory at warriorsfund.org with more than 144,900 verified listings covering all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories: VA hospitals and clinics, Vet Centers, county veteran service officers, benefits offices, housing programs, mental-health providers, employment services and veteran service organization posts. Listings are checked against the agencies that publish them and re-verified on a schedule, so a dead number gets flagged instead of being handed to the next veteran. The organization believes it is the largest free, open directory of veteran resources in the country, and it publishes the entire dataset so anyone can check.
It is free. There is no account to create, no app to download and no form to fill out. A veteran types a ZIP code and the nearest help appears.
Alongside the directory, Wounded Warriors publishes 174 plain-language guides to VA benefits, 88 in English and 86 in Spanish, written from the VA's own pages and the federal regulations behind them: how to file a PTSD claim, what the PACT Act presumptions mean for a veteran who served near a burn pit, how a surviving spouse applies for Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, how to request a discharge upgrade. The guides name the forms, the offices and the deadlines, and they link to the VA pages they are drawn from, so anyone can check the work.
All of it is released as open data under a Creative Commons license: five datasets, more than 388,000 records. Researchers, journalists, county offices and other nonprofits anywhere in the country can download it and build on it.
"We would rather this information be everywhere than be the only place that has it," said Dillon Parkes, the organization's founder and president and a U.S. Navy veteran. "Every veteran has been handed a number that rings to a fax machine. The directory's job is to make sure the number you're handed actually rings, whether you live in Conroe or Anchorage."
The directory is one side of the work. The other is direct help. Donor gifts also fund emergency financial assistance for veterans in a crisis, down-payment help for veterans buying a home, and care packages, awarded as funding allows.
Here is what it looks like close to home, wherever home is. Most counties run a veterans service office that files VA disability and pension claims at no charge, the same work some companies charge for. A veteran who has never filed a claim, or who was denied years ago and let it go, can start there, and the directory lists the local office with the number that actually rings.
A few things Wounded Warriors is not. It is not a government agency, and it takes no government money: no federal, state or VA dollars. It does not sell placement in the directory and it does not rank providers for a fee. Its only obligation is to the veteran looking for help and to the donors who pay for the work. Candid awarded the organization its 2026 Platinum Seal of Transparency, and its financial filings are public.
Anyone who wants to do one useful thing this Veterans Day can send warriorsfund.org to a veteran or military family they know. Anyone who wants to do a second can make a gift. Checks are payable to "Wounded Warriors" with "EIN 86-1336741" on the memo line, mailed to 1790 Hughes Landing Blvd, Suite 400, The Woodlands, TX 77380. The tax ID is how banks and donor-advised funds tell the organization apart from similarly named groups.
Veterans in crisis can call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The line is staffed around the clock, and no enrollment is needed to call.
The benefits were promised. The help exists in every state. Wounded Warriors exists to make it findable.
About Wounded Warriors: a national 501(c)(3) veterans charity (EIN 86-1336741) founded in 2021 and headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas. The free veteran resource directory is at warriorsfund.org. Contact: info@warriorsfund.org.
