About Slate Heron
Where the idea came from
Slate Heron began in 2019 when two former university colleagues — one who had spent years working in adult education, another who had written on behavioural economics for a regional publisher — sat in a Bangsar café and noticed a gap. There was, they agreed, plenty of noise around personal finance: apps, podcasts, influencers with charts. What there was not much of was quiet — structured space to sit with published research on why people spend the way they do, without being sold anything.
The name came from the heron they spotted on the pond in Taman Rimba Kiara that same afternoon. Patient, observant, unhurried. That felt like the right posture for what they wanted to build.
The first Reflection Notebook Workshop ran in early 2020 with eleven participants gathered in a borrowed room above a bookshop on Jalan Telawi. It was longer than planned, the coffee ran out, and three attendees asked when the next one was before they had even left. The organisation has grown carefully since then — adding the Reading Group format in 2021, and the Considered Spender Cohort in 2023 for the growing number of participants who wanted a longer, more structured engagement.
Today, Slate Heron programmes run from a permanent space at 5 Jalan Telawi 3. Every cohort is kept small. Every facilitator holds at least a postgraduate qualification in a relevant field — education, psychology, sociology, or economics. The printed reading materials are typeset in-house on a proper press, because we believe the format of a text shapes how you read it.
The Team
The people behind the sessions
Nurul Raziah
Programme Director
Holds an MA in Adult Education from Universiti Malaya. Has facilitated reflective learning programmes for over a decade, with a particular interest in how people narrate their relationship with money.
Darren Tan
Content & Research Lead
Previously wrote on behavioural economics for a KL-based regional publisher. Curates all reading materials and translates dense academic work into accessible discussion texts for participants.
Siti Aishah
Cohort Facilitator
BSc Psychology, MSc Organisational Behaviour. Leads the Considered Spender Cohort sessions and designs the journaling frameworks used across all programmes.
How We Work
Principles that guide every session
Qualified Facilitators
Every session is led by someone holding at least a postgraduate qualification in education, psychology, economics, or sociology. We do not outsource facilitation.
No Advice, No Products
Slate Heron holds no financial advisory or therapeutic licence. We do not sell financial products, make recommendations, or accept referral fees from any institution.
Participant Confidentiality
What participants share in sessions is treated as confidential. Facilitators do not discuss individual contributions outside the group context.
Source Transparency
All concepts discussed trace to specific published texts. Reading lists include full citations so participants can verify and extend their reading independently.
Inclusive Participation
Sessions are designed so participants with varying formal education backgrounds can engage meaningfully. Academic language is translated, not assumed.
Continuous Programme Review
Reading lists and session structures are reviewed at the end of each cohort cycle. New research is incorporated when it meaningfully adds to participant understanding.
Behavioural education on money habits in Kuala Lumpur
Spending behaviour sits at an unusual intersection — it is shaped by psychology, social environment, household dynamics, and cultural context all at once. Academic work in this space, from Kahneman and Thaler to more recent contributions from researchers across Southeast Asian contexts, offers a rich lens. The challenge has always been making that work accessible to people who do not hold economics degrees but who have a real, lived interest in understanding their own patterns.
That is the gap Slate Heron was built to address. The programmes at Jalan Telawi draw on published literature to create structured space for reflection — not instruction. Participants leave each session with their own observations sharpened, not with a prescribed action plan. This is intentional: the research itself suggests that durable changes in spending awareness emerge from sustained reflection, not from one-time exposure to rules or tips.
The Reading Group format specifically grew out of the observation that many adults find academic texts more engaging when read alongside others — where someone else's question can illuminate a passage you had read too quickly. The Considered Spender Cohort extends this principle across ten weeks, building a rhythm of reflection that participants report noticing long after the cohort ends.
Slate Heron is based in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, and currently runs in-person programmes only. All sessions are conducted in English.
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