What does it cost to get a forum set up? There's at least a few thousand daily, active regular users here, across all the sub forums we have got. A $10 donation from each of us would probably yield a war chest of $50,000, which would probably be enough to get the place started and pay for server costs and SEO and all that shyt for a year or two. Not to mention when we get the new place up and running we can offset the operating costs with ad money.
One thing is for sure, it has to be a collective. There has to be a great number of admins, at least a dozen if not two. The weakness of the Coli model with basically one owner is that if that owner becomes engaged in other projects, then the whole community will suffer for it. But if we have 20 admins, then it doesn't matter if one or two of them disappear. So it's better to operate with a collective ownership model than being run by a sole owner.