I actually don’t feel you are overthinking it, because the word “forum” became a bit tainted over the years due to how out of date the traditional forum software got, and how erratic spam control and moderation was in the old software. When you think “forum”, you think..
ehhh this might kinda be old, out of date .. and suck?
That’s one of the things we set out to fix with Discourse! To rehabilitate the very word “forum”! But it’s gonna take a long time, even though we’ve been at this for 7+ years, we have miles to go before we sleep, and miles to go before we sleep.
Even divorced from the negative software connotations, forum is also kind of an abstract, old timey Latin word, and sounds a tad formal.
Some of my suggestions are
- Youth Power Coalition talk
- Youth Power Coalition community
- Youth Power Coalition hangout
- Youth Power Coalition group
- Youth Power Coalition camp
- Youth Power Coalition clubhouse
- Youth Power Coalition chat (this is a bit risky, if people are expecting actual real time chat, but Discourse is reasonably chatty)
I dunno, you can riff on that theme, use synonym generators to explore, maybe brainstorm with the group itself in a Discourse topic! People love having a say in what their community is, and the name is a big part of that.
It also depends how serious you want it to feel and be, versus how fun / entertaining. It can be both!