Through the facilitation of a collaborative mural-making project with Inside Out Youth Services in Colorado Springs, Colorado, this reflexive thesis proposes a new framework for organizing community-based arts initiatives that seek to visibilize and empower marginalized populations. By employing a reflexive strategy for this research, I assess the facets of my own capital possession which influence my access to this sort of project, and in doing so, I propose a new, critical framework for facilitating community-based arts projects which asserts joy and fun as essential elements in community building, and posits doodling as a powerful strategy for subverting hegemonic standards for artistic production. By valorizing personal experience and emotion through the facilitation of joy and the provision of a common goal which fostered easy, comfortable conversation, this project fostered open dialogue among participants, a pivotal component of collective knowledge creation and thus, community building and cultural solidification.