i would like to set up a forum for an organization i am part of. where would i begin? are there any free places to do so?

You could try ezboard.com. But I'm sure there are better ones... if you want one like sciforums (without annoying advertisements, your own domain, more customizability) you'll probably have to rent your own webserver and bandwidth, which is what I do, about 30€ a year, but you need some knowledge of webservers and maybe mysql if you want that.

Try this (http://www.phpbbserver.com/). It's free, and the support community is massive.