Justification for Changes to 0990-0340

Justification for a Non-substantive Change under 0990-0340

As part of the 3012 Extension Center document we included an excel tool that was designed to assist applicants with collecting  the information that was outlined in the FOA.  Unfortunately, the excel document that was initially approved with the emergency request was outdated and didn't exactly match the FOA criteria.  The attached updated tool, exactly matches what is in the approved FOA.

The program is requesting that the attached excel form replace the currently approved form because it is more accurate. The program needs to release the revised form to public in order to have this data collected by next Monday, which is why the program is requesting an expedited review of this new information. A meeting was held with the perspective grantees late last week and they were getting lots of questions from applicants about the form. The program needs this request approved as quickly as possible to allow the applicants ample time to review and submit the required documents.

When asked to provide a highlighted version of the changes, since the person who wrote this version was on leave, the program felt that it would be too involved/difficult for the staff on hand to develop a highlighted version, suffice it to say that the previous version deviated significantly from what was literally in the FOA, which would have required us to use different information by which to judge applications that chose to use the template and those that didn’t (which would have been a serious problem). Basically the new version is a complete overhaul of the original document. The attached version exactly follows the FOA-required content requirements.