This essay, shortlisted for the AHUA Dr Jonathan Nicholls Memorial Essay Prize, addresses recent policy attention on student maintenance funding in the United Kingdom. It proposes the establishment of a graduate-funded endowment in lieu of other measures such as increased parental contributions or the imposition of a graduate tax. After discussing the relationship between maintenance funding and student outcomes, the essay then envisages how voluntary graduate contributions could be pooled into a national endowment, and how this endowment might address access and participatory inequalities relating to student expenditure on housing, energy, food and care. Although presented here only as a broad idea, the essay discusses how this could be achieved through investment in, as well as the incubation of, social enterprises aligned with the endowment's purpose -- to ensure that maintenance costs do not restrict access and impair student outcomes, and to do so in a sustainable and prudential way.