Former Shriners Children’s Patient Dani Aravich Named Social Media Contractor for Team USA at Paris 2024
The athlete will continue training for the 2026 Winter Paralympics.
Former Shriners Children’s Salt Lake City and Spokane patient Dani Aravich made her first visit to the nonprofit healthcare system when she was just 4 months old.
Since then, she’s accomplished a tremendous amount, including competing in both the 2021 Summer and 2022 Winter Paralympics. This summer, she stepped away from the track and earned a role as a social media contractor to create content across various platforms for Team USA in Paris, all while training for the 2026 Winter Paralympics, where she hopes to compete in Nordic skiing and biathlon.
Aravich was born without a left hand and forearm, and she was fit for her first prosthetic when she was just 4 months old. She then wore her first myoelectric arm, a device that operates based on electrical signals from the residual limb, that Shriners Children’s provided for an upper arm limb difference around 1999. Aside from the prosthetic care that helped her compete in different sports while growing up, Aravich also got to interact with other children with limb differences at Shriners Children’s, a hugely important experience for her. Aravich, now 28, has recently volunteered over the past few years in various roles with the nonprofit healthcare system to give back.
“There was a group of families with kids that had limb differences that you could hang out with when I went to Shriners Children’s,” Aravich said. “That’s the first time I met someone else with a disability while growing up. It made me realize, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of people out here also missing limbs.’ Sometimes growing up, you felt isolated as someone with a limb difference. Recently when I was living in Salt Lake City, I volunteered at the Shriners Children’s ski camp. It was cool to be with kids with a variety of disabilities. In 2018 when I volunteered at the hospital, I knew we had a stash of the Barbie with a prosthetic. There was a 13-year-old girl and I got to give her one of the Barbies with a prosthetic leg. It’s cool to be in that environment and to see the kids at the ski camp form connections between each other.”
The fact that Shriners Children’s provides prosthetics regardless of a family’s ability to pay can help catapult other children into those sports because of the high-quality prosthetic care.
