About Velkyr
A writing organisation
built around one question
What is your money story, and have you ever put it into words?
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How Velkyr began
Velkyr was started in 2019 by a small group of adult educators and essayists who had, over years of running evening reading groups, noticed something particular: when the reading material touched on household economics — inheritance, scarcity, the meaning of work — the conversations changed register. They became personal, careful, and often more alive than any others the groups had.
The question the founders kept returning to was a simple one: most adults in mid-life have a relationship with money that was shaped long before they had any say in it. The household they grew up in, the assumptions that were never named, the silences around certain conversations — these things do not simply dissolve in adult life. They persist as patterns, as habits of thought, as the frame through which later decisions are made. And yet most adults have never sat down to write out what those patterns are.
Velkyr was built to create a space for that writing. Not financial planning. Not therapy. Not a seminar on economic concepts. Something quieter and more particular: a room, some structure, a small group, and the invitation to put experience into plain English.
The programme has run in Singapore since 2019, primarily for adults in their forties, fifties, and sixties who are at a stage of life where these questions feel timely — where inheritance, retirement, obligation to adult children, or the shifting shape of work have brought the money story back to the surface.
Mission
What we are here to do
Writing as a way of knowing
Velkyr proceeds from the belief that writing is not just a way of recording what you know — it is a way of discovering it. The workshops are designed to make use of that capacity, applied to the particular subject of money and its place in a life.
General education, not advice
Everything at Velkyr is adult education and money literacy — an effort to improve the general understanding of financial themes, not to provide personal recommendations. The distinction matters, and we hold it carefully.
A community of writers
Over time, Velkyr has become something of a community. Former workshop participants return for the monthly evenings. Some have gone on to write essays of their own. The work, when it lands, tends to stay.
The People
Who leads the workshops
Rachel Lim
Founding Director
Rachel has been running adult writing programmes in Singapore for over a decade. She trained as an essayist and spent several years editing a small literary journal before founding Velkyr.
Marcus Chong
Workshop Facilitator
Marcus holds a background in adult education and has facilitated reading and writing groups since 2015. He leads the six-week cohorts with particular attention to creating space for quieter voices in the group.
Priya Waran
Programme Coordinator
Priya manages the monthly reading evenings and coordinates the logistics of each cohort. She joined Velkyr in 2021 after several years in community education and cultural programme management.
Our Standards
How we run what we run
Privacy within sessions
What is shared in a workshop stays in a workshop. Participants are briefed on this expectation from the first session. No personal financial details are ever requested or recorded by Velkyr.
Regulatory positioning
Velkyr is an adult education organisation, not a financial services provider. Our programmes do not constitute advice of any regulated kind. This boundary is set out clearly in all materials and is maintained without exception.
Editorial quality
Reading materials are curated from published essays and short prose — widely available works that participants can seek out independently. Nothing proprietary or unattributed is used.
Facilitation standards
Facilitators hold adult education backgrounds and receive ongoing training in group facilitation. No session is run by someone without significant prior experience of writing and reading group work.
Data protection
Participant data is held in accordance with the Personal Data Protection Act (Singapore). Contact details are used only for programme administration and are not shared with third parties.
Programme review
Programmes are reviewed each year with written feedback from participants. Content and facilitation are adjusted in response. The approach is considered and iterative rather than fixed.
Values and Approach
What Velkyr stands for
Velkyr occupies a particular position in Singapore's adult education landscape: between the financial literacy seminar and the personal journal, between the reading group and the structured course. The people who find their way to us are typically those who already read, who have thought about money at a general level, and who are now curious about the more personal dimension — what their own story has been, and what it might mean.
The tone of the organisation is one we have thought about carefully. It is editorial rather than promotional. Measured rather than urgent. The room is a working space, not a stage. Nobody is being sold a result or a transformation. The workshops offer a practice: a structured way of sitting down, reading a little, and writing — applied to the subject of money in the context of a life.
We are interested in the long-term. A participant who attended the six-week workshop in 2021 and now comes to the monthly evenings, who has begun to write about these themes for themselves, who brings a considered sense of their own patterns into the decisions they make — that is the kind of engagement Velkyr is built for. Slow, returning, accumulative.
For Singaporean adults specifically, the material is shaped by the particular textures of the households many grew up in — the expectations carried across generations, the role of CPF and property in family planning, the experience of children who watched parents navigate economic migration or rapid urban change. These are not abstract themes. They are the stuff of real writing.
Next Step
Curious whether Velkyr is the right fit?
Write to us. We are happy to describe the current programme calendar, the format of sessions, and whether the six-week workshop or the monthly evenings might suit your situation best.
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