Ms. Emi Koch is the International SSF Educator & Learner Focus Group Coordinator. She initiated the conversations with local community educational partners, administered contracts, payments, and survey design, analysis, and follow-up with educators. She also facilitated in-person sessions with teachers in Lobitos, Peru, and took learners' activities to schools along the Northern Coast of Peru to pilot with new groups of students. Julia Moore, an undergraduate (rather than graduate) student from Northeastern University in Boston, United States, supported her. BTSI paid her the same as we would have a graduate student because of her sincere, earnest dedication to the project. She used her stipend to come to Peru to meet participants and facilitated stop-motion animation workshops as part of the coastal pilots.

Rosemarie Lerner, the curriculum's impact producer, developed the surveys and joined late-night sessions with educators waking up in Madagascar and India to co-design the project's impact vision together. BTSI used the budget for unanticipated costs to consult with Carole Mercier, a nonprofit educator with experience producing training for the trainer programs to help us onboard educators when it became more apparent that the focus was on engaging with teachers and then students in designing the curriculum. Carole is committed to supporting the development of the onboarding series highlighted in the proposal for the curriculum's subsequent stages.

Beyond the Surface International divided translation costs with each location and utilized the budget to translate young people's work into English in some cases (Peru) while also accounting for the time and dedication to transcribe participants' work and feedback into a digital format to analyze and feed back into the curriculum, improving upon the lesson plans and enrichment activities based on their engagement experience. BTSI feels that facilitating the focus groups is one crucial piece, but leveraging and mobilizing students' experiences is another that was unanticipated beyond simply integrating their feedback directly into the curriculum. Therefore, BTSI asked educators to use creative mechanisms in addition to traditional surveys for students to share their experiences in what commonly became known as the "SSF Sessions." BTSI used parts of the translation budget to support this sharing. In Peru, BTSI's Coast 2 Coast facilitators worked with Peruvian educator & learner focus group participants to produce the entire video highlighting their experience exploring the SSF Guidelines, framed by their questions and insights. In the Amazon and Andrean pilots, participants piloting activities and lesson plans co-designed by focus group educators & students also shared their learnings in the form of interviews which we find to be a better mechanism to gauge students' understanding than written surveys alone. BTSI allocated $734.00 to realize these three videos with translations.

Coast 2 Coast also collaborated with Peruvian university students to develop the initial ideas for the additional resources necessary to make learning through the curriculum's audiovisual activities more accessible. Rather than purchase a Zoom Pro account, BTSI bought a yearlong subscription to VMarker to record sessions with educators to process feedback (although the internet connectivity made its use challenging). Finally, in an effort to disseminate and share the curriculum as an innovative, playful approach to engage with the SSF Guidelines, BTSI translated learnings onto this website as the foundation of something to be built out further with funding for the project's second stage.