Introduction

History
We'll start the introduction to Scouting in the Netherlands with a little bit of history. We'll keep it brief, but to understand how scouting in the Netherlands works nowadays, we have to look back.
In 1910, shortly after Scouting started in England, the first organisation for boy-scouts was started in The Netherlands, a few years later followed by a girl-scouts organisation. Both organisations were open for all, but in time the Catholic church (which had many members in the Netherlands in those days) started two organisations (one for boys and one for girls) of their own.
When the Netherlands were occupied during WW II, all these scouting organisations were forbidden. Many scoutinggroups still existed, however, in secret and often assisting the resistance in the Netherlands. After the war, everything had to start again and scouting quickly regained its pre-war popularity.
The times changed, however and in 1973 (when many people in the Netherlands were not religious anymore) it was decided it was for the better to merge the four scouting-organisations in to one general organisation for boys and girls. The name Scouting Nederland was chosen, to avoid choosing a name that looked too much like that of one of the previous organisations and to emphasise the international charachter of the scouts-movement.

Goals
Scouting Nederland aims to be an organisation that is open to all youth, regardless of their sexe, religion, race and sexual preference. We want to offer our members a consistent set of values, the spiritual aspect being one of those. This can also be found in the Dutch scouts-oath, which states (translated): " ..to consciously seek and endorse the good..." after which the individual can chose (it's not obligatory) to add "with the help of God." .

Click here to find out more about the way Scouting in the Netherlands is organised. This is rather important, because there are significant differences with for instance the United States.