The Effingham Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting will be held Thursday at 7 p.m., celebrating 30 years of the Chamber.

The Chamber will recognize the winner of the annual John Adam Treutlen Award and its small business of the year.

Effingham’s own Nick Mueller will provide the dinner, and columnist Dick Yarbrough will be the speaker for the evening.

Yarbrough, whose column appears weekly in the Effingham Herald, is the author of the 2002 book “And They Call Them Games — An Inside View of the 1996 Olympics.” Yarbrough was managing director of communications and government relations for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

He retired after more than 40 years with BellSouth as a vice president. He has served on the state board of juvenile justice and also on Gov. Nathan Deal’s education reform committee. Yarbrough twice has been honored as having the best humor column in the state by the Georgia Press Association and his columns reach an audience of 1.3 million readers each week.

A graduate of the University of Georgia, Yarbrough has been named an outstanding graduate by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications. He created the C. Richard Yarbrough chair in crisis communications leadership at the Grady College, the first of its kind in the nation.

Georgia Trend magazine has named Yarbrough one of its 100 most influential Georgians, and the Georgia chapter of the Public Relations Society of America has inducted him into its hall of fame and elected him to the Order of the Phoenix, its highest award.

To RSVP, call the Chamber at 754-3301.