How do you measure impact? By its reach. By the lives it affects. By the allies brought into the movement.

When workers at the Chimpanzee Conservation Center saw their former resident Annie thriving in her natural forest home in 2016, they raised a cheer.

Muhsin Hendricks,imam and founder ofThe Inner Circle Bullied at home, at school, and in the workplace, Khartini Slamah blamed God for giving her a male body which led those around her to misgender her. “My father wanted me to become a perfect boy… Being Muslim and transgender was not easy at that age.

With LGBT protections coming under increasing threat in the United States during the summer of 2017, growing alliances are forging all over the U.S.

While levels of homophobic and transphobic violence and discrimination rose to new heights during 2016 and the first half of 2017—with anti-gay atrocities committed in Chechnya sending shockwaves around the world—a handful of countries also made unprecedented moves to recognize same-sex relations or enact stronger LGBT protections. “The international community’s demand for investigations and prosecution for perpetrators of violations in Chechnya is important,” says Kim Vance, executive director of ARC International, referring to the detention and torture of 100 men perceived to be gay by authorities in the Russian autonomous region.

When Muyisa arrived in 2014 at the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education (GRACE) Center, on a rugged mountaintop west of Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Virunga National Park, she was an anxious four-year-old, with bald patches on her head from pulling her hair. It had been three years since police had rescued her from poachers in neighboring Rwanda.

As first light breaks over the tropical forest, a howl crescendos and peaks. For 30 minutes at five o’clock each morning, the silhouetted figures atop the 130-foot-high canopy call out their spot for the day’s pickings of sweet fruits and leaves yielded by the dense evergreens.