Amid the festive trappings of a “Passport to Progress … Multicultural Celebration,” the Statesboro-Bulloch Chamber of Commerce saluted its best and most innovative businesses, employee-positive workplaces and influential leaders and mentors Tuesday evening.
The Chamber Annual Meeting and Awards event looking back on 2024 and forward into 2025 was held inside The Market at Visit Statesboro. About 285 people reportedly registered and about 260 dinner seats were available. So it was, Chamber President Jennifer Davis announced as it concluded, the current staff’s first sold-out annual meeting.
Among the top awards, Bubba Golf – the golf services, gear and gadgets shop and website launched by serial entrepreneur Bubba Hunt with his family and friends – was named 2024 Start-Up of the Year; Three Tree Coffee was named Small Business of the Year; and Shea Tractor and Equipment Company, the local Kubota dealership, was named Employer of the Year.
The Statesboro-Bulloch Chamber saluted Freedom Through Recovery, a Statesboro-based 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in April 2019 and “focused solely on peer support” for individuals in recovery as 2024 Nonprofit of the Year.
Easily the chamber’s most prestigious award for an individual, the Bruce Yawn Lifetime Achievement Award, was awarded to Lowell Mooney, Ph.D., director of graduate programs in the Parker College of Business at Georgia Southern University. Among other accomplishments, Mooney created the Apprenticeship Master of Accounting Program to address a critical shortage of CPAs by opening pathways to accounting for individuals from diverse educational backgrounds.
Lowell is the third person to receive the chamber’s Lifetime Achievement Award since it was renamed for the late Bruce Yawn. Development Authority of Bulloch County CEO Benjy Thompson, a colleague of both Yawn and Lowell in different roles, presented the award.
Newly renamed, the Steven Sanders Leadership Bulloch Alumni of the Year Award for 2024 was presented to Mary-Lynn Pennington, a Synovus Bank employee and member of the Leadership Bulloch Class of 2023. Leadership Bulloch is an annual program of the chamber.
Sanders, a Synovus employee who was a Georgia Southern University graduate with a degree in finance and a graduate of the Leadership Bulloch Class of 2011, died last August of cancer at age 47.
The chamber’s Ambassador of the Year award for 2024 went to Maggie David for her enthusiastic work as a Chamber Ambassador, a volunteer promoting member participation in chamber programs and events.
With the 2024 Annual Meeting (held Jan. 14, 2025), the chamber also presented a brand-new award, CTAE Instructor of the Year. “CTAE” means career, technical and agricultural education, and the chamber’s first such award went to Josh Hall, Statesboro High School construction and carpentry teacher.
The Market at Visit Statesboro is the venue where the Main Street Farmers Market operates with the big doors open in warmer months. But the side doors were rolled down tight and the heat working Tuesday night. The three dining and cocktail stations, one with “Latin cuisine” to accompany margaritas, one with “Asian cuisine” and Mai Tais and one with “European cuisine” (or an American finger-food interpretations thereof, like the others) and sangria helped create the festive mood.
So did “dueling pianos” entertainment provided by locally based, widely known musicians Michael Braz and Jerry Roberson, in an earlier-evening sample of the tag-team keyboard rivalry they often conduct at Gators & Gypsies pub on Tuesday nights.
For a more complete report on the annual Chamber Meeting and Awards, see the Thursday edition of the Statesboro Herald.