Lots of my childhood memories involve tombola.

We’re a family of joiners: when there’s something needing done, we link up with others and get stuck in. So I was forever being plonked behind a table and told to sell tombola tickets in support of one cause of another.

If you’re the kind of person who reads a Co-operative Party pamphlet you might well have similar memories, of evenings spent in community centres, church halls or working men’s clubs. And I hope you’ll share my alarm that our children are much less likely to be able to say the same.

To give some sense of the rate at which we are losing these key bits of social infrastructure, it is worth looking to the Club and Institute Union (CIU), the central co-op which supports the clubs movement. Half a century ago the CIU issued around seven million membership cards every year. Now it’s about one million.

That is an enormous rate of decline for these magical places that are one part community centre, one part pub and one part extension of the family sitting room.

Their loss is terrible news for everyone as the kinds of social bonds made in clubs are crucial for our wellbeing. In a recent paper, Demos cited a literature review of 148 international research studies, concluding that strong ties have a huge bearing on our longevity. That builds on the finding from the former US Surgeon General that loneliness is as bad for us as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

In turn, Local Trust research has shown what is obvious from everyday life: access to community spaces is a necessary precondition for developing relationships beyond our families.

It just isn’t good for us to spend more and more of our time behind our own front door with our algorithmically-generated Netflix, Spotify and Amazon recommendations and clubs are exactly the sort of places that help us to open up and turn strangers into friends.

We need those wider neighbourhood ties so that there’s somewhere to turn when someone needs to sit with one sleeping child because another needs raced to A&E, or our houses or businesses got battered in a storm. Online connections can be sustaining, but they are no replacement for someone who has a spare set of keys.

That matters for all of us as individuals but it has a wider impact on our ability to live together well too. As places to meet become harder to find, so too does the common ground between us.

HOPE Not Hate research has found that the presence of this kind of venue is a key indicator of community health and – therefore – an important inoculation against populist politics. People who don’t encounter each other are less likely to trust each other, and where trust is absent, division can grow.

And as collective spaces shut, we all lose out on opportunities for shared wonder too: the Music Venue Trust’s latest figures show we’ve lost 125 grassroots music venues in just a year.

So this stuff matters to all of us, whether we are interested in public health, community cohesion or simply the joy that comes from having an unforgettable night at a gig. That makes it possible to build a broad and enduring coalition behind an effort to save our social infrastructure.

It is incumbent on us, however, to make sure that any such movement is not stripped of its politics. If we simply ensured that local authorities provided community centres and there were enough pubs and privately-owned events spaces available for hire we would not, in my view, have succeeded.

Clubs matter because they aren’t simply places we can go: clubs are places we can belong. Being rooted in a membership model they provide a microcosm of what a more co-operative economy and society could be.

Think of each of our co-operative values: self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. All of them find expression in the life of a club, making the club movement one of the greatest engines of progress in our history. It’s not an accident that, at its height, the clubs movement sent even more working people to parliament than the trade unions.

Working class clubs have a proud history, but we need not think of them as simply part of our heritage. Plenty of clubs have reimagined themselves for the 21^st century, and those that are yet to do so could with a little bit of help. So if we want to have a thriving clubs sector long into the future, there is much we can do to support clubs to survive and then to thrive.

Firstly, join. Our co-operative politics informed Labour’s manifesto commitment to community ownership and we look forward to a new era of communities taking the buildings and facilities that matter to them into their shared protection. Clubs, however, are already there and joining one is one of the best things you can do to help show community ownership works in practice.

Secondly, champion the policies which could have an outsized impact on clubs. Whether it’s cracking down on ticket touts, reforming planning or providing funding for local growth, our Labour government already has plenty of change on the way that could benefit our clubs.

Thirdly, help locate our support for clubs in our wider politics of place. Our Labour government had a terrible economic inheritance from the Tories and it was the right thing to do to focus on emergency action to clear that up. The first phase of this government was about fixing the foundations. The next, as we implement our Plan for Change, is about advancing the decade of national renewal we promised.

Our distinctive co-operative contribution to that effort can be in translating these national ambitions into local plans.

Just as our allies in the trade union movement will be reminding ministers that the New Deal for Working People must come alive in individual workplaces and shift the balance of power between workforces and their actual employers, so we in the co-operative movement must anchor conversations about national policy in the neighbourhoods and local places where people mark the most important moments of their lives.

Quarter of a way through this century we have enormous challenges in our economy and wider society. The answer, as always, is to club together.