The Family Literacy Initiative (FLI) is a project that began as a few workshops offered to parents of elementary students who wanted to know what they could do in the summer to keep their kids writing. Since that time the FLI has grown tremendously: in the past five years, the authors have offered 130 workshops, reaching more than 2,750 adults and students. At the heart of these workshops is their commitment to working with parents, inviting them into what can sometimes seem the closed community of schools, a place where they may not see themselves as having a role. The authors suggest that immersing parents in discussions of writing and offering them ways to help their own children and teens as writers can help send a message about the value of thoughtful writing instruction. In this article, the authors describe workshops and other methods for getting parents productively involved in their children's literacy development. (Contains 3 notes and 2 figures.)